Some women have also convinced their husbands to give them individual plots where they now produce cowpea, groundnut and new sorghum varieties for family consumption.
Sorghum and millet are climate-resilient cereals that are crucial staple foods in the rural Malian diet, providing three quarters of the total energy intake of mothers.
Sanogo has also been teaching women to cook sorghum and millet grains with protein-rich legumes like cowpea.
The consumption of wholegrain sorghum increased from seven (baseline household consumption survey) to 96 in six targeted villages.
Oral and visual nutrition education is followed by a communal cookery class with this week's menu of protein-rich peanut and amaranth sauce, iron and vitamin C-rich soumbala (made from nere seeds) and wholegrain sorghum porridge, tô.
She cooks her tô with wholegrain sorghum in a society where women are expected to grind the grain to separate the bran.
Locally grown crops such as yam, manioc, sorghum, sweet potatoes and maize were the staples of previous generations, who had rice as a Sunday treat.
As for farmers, they grow qat because it gives them five times the profit from coffee, and 25 times that from sorghum, the local staple.Indeed, qat has brought cash to rural areas, helping to stem the flow of immigrants to the over-crowded cities.
Ceres, which is based in Thousand Oaks, California, has taken several species of fast-growing grass, notably switchgrass and sorghum, and supercharged them to grow even faster and put on more weight by using a mixture of selective breeding and genetic engineering.
It has research stations for cassava and sorghum, which are African staples.
J.C. Kuessner, a state representative, focuses on home issues at the Willard event: energy prices, country roads, sweetgrass and sorghum incentives, and the farm bill, which Mr McCain opposed.
