Sorghum crops

Sorghum is a grass in the same family as corn and sugarcane. It is a high biomass grass in the botnaical tribe, Andropogoneae. It was domesticated about 5,000 years ago and nearly all of its genetic material comes from varieties that were originally cultivated in Africa.

Sorghum are grown on evry continent of the world except Antarctica. The genus of sorghum is found in warm, dry climates, especially in Africa, India, Pakistan, China and the Southern USA where its members are grown as important grain or forage crops.

Sorghum is normally cultivated as an annual. In warm climates such as the Texas Gulf Coats, grain sorghum can be managed to produce new tillers after the frost harvest and grow a second grain crop.

The sorghum grain crop is threshed from standing stalks with a combine, usually before frost. In the drier areas, the moisture content of grain threshed from green stalks frequently is low enough to allow immediate storage of grain without drying. Sorghum is a food staple in many parts of Africa and Asia.

The seed of grain sorghum or dura as it is often called, contains no gluten, and hence is by itself not suitable for bread making.

Normally for human consumption the grain is group into flour, mixed with water or fat and cooked to form a porridge or batter.
Sorghum crops

Sorghum

Sorghum
The wild sorghums present a diverse array of morphological variability and have presented taxonomists with an interesting challenge.

The three main native species located in Asia an Africa are Sorghum bicolor, Sorghum propinguum and Sorghum halepense.

Sorghum bicolor subp. Arundinaceum is an allotetraploid that is found in tropical Africa, while S. propinguum shares the same chromosome number and is located in Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

S. halepense or Johnson grass is a segmental auto-allo-octoploid and is located in an overlapping zone between the other two species.

The sorghums are summer growing crops which are used in a number of ways grain sorghum for grain; sweet or folder sorghum, Sudan grass and Columbus grass for silage, green feed and grazing; and broom millet for brooms and brushware.

However, the grain is used primarily as stock-feed and is an important source for supplementing other coarse grains for this purpose.
Sorghum

Sorghum

Sorghum
The genus of Sorghum is found in warm, dry climates, especially in Africa, India, Pakistan, China and the Southern USA where its members are grown as important grain or forage crops. Because sorghums have been in cultivation for a long time and because interspecific hybrids are easily formed, the taxonomy of the genus is somewhat confused. Until recently the cultivated types were loosely grouped together in the species Sorghum vulgare, but a thorough revision of taxonomic relationships suggests that Sorghum bicolor is the species to which the grain crops should belong.

The seed of grain sorghum or dura as it is often called, contains no gluten, and hence is by itself not suitable for bread making. Normally for human consumption the grain is group into flour, mixed with water or fat and cooked to form a porridge or batter. Alternatively, the grain is fed to pigs or poultry, its starch may be used for a variety of purposes such as an adhesive or for sizing or it may be fermented to produce alcohol. Sorghum are also grown as forage crops and may produce high yields of the order of 30,000 kg/ha from several cuts throughout the year.

Best resulted are obtained from special forage types such as sorgo, sweet or sugar sorghum which is variously described as a variety of sorghum or as a separate species (Sorghum saccharatum). Sudan grass (S. Sudanese), a tall and tufted tropical grass, is often used top produce hybrids with sorghum, as for example the production forage plants Sudax or Sordan.

One possible problem with these forages is that contained in the leaves there may be a cyanogenic glycoside, dhurrin, which when eaten by animals hydrolyses to form poisonous hydrogen cyanide. In ruminants, hydrogen cyanide is rapidly detoxified in the rumen and liver by reaction with sulphide or cystine, but the danger of toxicity remains of glycoside levels are high or sulphur intake is low. The problem can be avoided by the choice of safe cultivars by not allowing stock to graze very immature growth, or by feeding as hay or silage.
Sorghum