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In the exhibit hall of a convention center in Lubbock, Texas, chef Chase Obenchain stands on a small black stage, demonstrating how to make a variation of Spanish rice.
As attendees are served the dish for lunch, Obenchain adds the ingredients to a pan: garlic, onions, tomatoes – but not rice. Instead, this dish calls for sorghum.
“Sorghum has a really, really beautiful way of just absorbing whatever cooking liquid that there is with it to be able to really showcase whatever other things it's being cooked with,” Obenchain said while he mixed the pearl-like sorghum grains with the vegetables.
Obenchain was cooking at the Global Sorghum Conference in mid-September for an audience of researchers, farmers and agribusiness professionals from around the world – all people well acquainted with sorghum. As corporate chef for the Sorghum Checkoff, a group that supports the sorghum industry, Obenchain often appears publicly to speak about the hardy grain. But usually he has to start with the basics.
“The first thing people say to me when I say I work with sorghum, it’s usually ‘What is sorghum?’” Obenchain said.
Sorghum, also called milo, is a kind of cereal like corn or wheat. It’s versatile — you can grind it into flour, pop it like popcorn, or boil it, like Obenchain did.
While the U.S. is the world’s leading producer of sorghum it’s hardly a staple here. Yet the grain could become an attractive option for farmers for one reason: it can grow through drought.
In order to develop the market farmers would need, though, more Americans have to eat it.
“The irony is the United States is the number one [sorghum] growing country in the world, but we either export a lot of it or we use it for other uses like ethanol, animal feed, things like that, and it’s just not as well known,” said Lanier Dabruzzi, director of nutrition and food innovation for the Sorghum Checkoff.
Farming ‘where things are tough’
In other parts of the world, sorghum is a staple. It’s commonly consumed by people in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
“Sorghum in Ghana is largely for food. All the sorghum production we do is targeted for human consumption,” said Kenneth Opare-Obuobi, a Ghanaian sorghum researcher who attended the conference with the Africa Dryland Crops Improvement Network.
In Ghana, climate change is pushing more farmers to plant sorghum, according to Opare-Obuobi.
“We are equally experiencing highly unpredictable rainfall patterns, and as a result we are having some bit of drought. But it turns out that sorghum is a bit hardy so farmers are tending to now shift toward sorghum,” he said.
Sorghum thrives in conditions that make other crops wilt. It welcomes heat and tolerates drought. The plant grows deep roots to capture hard-to-reach moisture beneath the soil, according to Sarah Sexton Bowser, director for the Center for Sorghum Improvement at Kansas State University.
“A connecting thread of sorghum production across the globe is you find sorghum production in spots where things are tough,” said Sexton Bowser.
That makes sorghum an increasingly attractive option for American farmers, too.
In the U.S., most sorghum grows in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska with water from the Ogallala Aquifer, a massive underground water reserve. Farmers on the Great Plains rely on the aquifer, but its supply is dwindling faster than it can be recharged in some areas.
Once a year, Sexton Bowser drives the length of the belt with colleagues, from central Kansas to Lubbock.
“And what I have seen in my over decade working for sorghum is a rapid change in the water resources,” she said.
Sorghum has gradually lost acres in the U.S. since a peak in the 1970s. As water becomes scarcer however, farmers may plant more drought-tolerant crops like sorghum.
Sexton Bowser said she’s been getting calls from farmers across the country who are curious about the grain.
“They may have had a summer recently where they had an acute heat period, or a water stress period,” she said. “They're looking at changing their [crop] rotations to support their water systems. And those are new growers coming into the fold.”
A pantry staple?
The market for American sorghum farmers can be challenging though. Prices can be heavily dependent on demand in China, which buys a large volume of imported sorghum from the U.S. and other countries.
To support more acres, industry members hope they can get more Americans to consume it.
“There’s no reason people should have never heard of it,” said sorghum entrepreneur Jessica Davidoff. “It grows here. It’s not like we’re discovering acai from Brazil or quinoa from the Andes.”
Davidoff is the founder and CEO of food brand Cob, which makes popped sorghum. Popped sorghum is like small, soft popcorn. It’s especially good for kids, Davidoff said, because it lacks the sharp hull that can get stuck in their throat or between their teeth.
“You eat it more like a trail mix, like I scoop it up by the handful instead of eating kernel by kernel,” she said.
Davidoff plans to eventually package and sell uncooked sorghum grains like rice or quinoa, with the hope that it becomes a pantry staple in the U.S. too.
Cob also recently released a sorghum tortilla chip. She says that even though sorghum may have low name recognition, other trends may lead people to the grain.
“It’s like this fiber tidal wave, this antioxidant tidal wave,” said Davidoff. “Our product and sorghum specifically, kind of hits all of them. So we get to like ride these waves, even though the wave isn’t a sorghum wave yet.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
