To increase the crop diversity of the worlds agricultural systems, expanded research and development efforts are needed to address many issues that keep various crops out of mainstream agricultural production systems. There are many potential crops, or groups of crops that could be studied, and it is important to choose plants that have the potential to give a valuable return on the investments that needs to be made for their improvement. Millets and hemp are some of the plants that have great potential to improve our cropping systems, but significant research is required to overcome their current limitations. Millets are a diverse group of grain crops that have great potential to deliver valuable yields as the world’s climate continues to change and water scarcity increases. To further develop millet crops, genomic marker data sets were developed from accessions in the core collections of kodo millet, little millet, and proso millet. These marker sets were used to better understand the underlying genetics of these crops, and were provided as a public resource for future research efforts. For pearl millet, genomic selection was investigated as a potential approach to increase the speed at which pearl millet lines resistant to the parasitic weed Striga and the disease downy mildew can be developed. Hemp has historically been a major fiber crop, and has potential applications for food and medicine. In the 20th century the United States listed hemp as a schedule 1 drug and its production was completely outlawed, but in recent years it has been allowed to come back into production. We developed a genetic marker data set, and analyzed the chemical composition of twenty-two commercially available hemp accessions to better understand the genetic stability of the accessions that many farmers are working with. We also worked to better understand what are the current issues that need to be addressed by further research. The continued development of genomic resources for millets and hemp will give researchers the tools needed to quickly advance these crops and allow farmers to more fully utilize the potential of these crops to improve our agricultural systems.