e’re excited about the “buzz” sorghum generates at a conference such as the Fuel Ethanol Workshop. Many attendees who dropped by the U.S. Sorghum Checkoff booth in St. Louis had sweet sorghum on their minds. USCP has worked diligently over the past year to provide information on grain sorghum as a feedstock in the ethanol process, sorghum distillers grains, transportation logistics and more. Our comprehensive education plan is a key step in achieving our goal to increase the inclusion rate of grain sorghum to produce ethanol by 50 percent.

The Sorghum Checkoff is committed to meeting the needs of sorghum growers and ethanol producers. When it comes to discussing the potential of sweet sorghum in the biofuels production process, we share in the excitement.

Let’s start with the basics. Sweet sorghum is a tall, leafy plant that looks like sugar cane. It is versatile enough to be grown from South Texas and Florida, all the way north to Wisconsin and New York. The yields will vary depending on growing location and climatic conditions. For decades, sweet sorghum has been cultivated in the South as a boutique crop. It is typically processed on-farm into sorghum syrup for human consumption through labor-intensive practices, because there are no current commercial harvesters designed specifically for the crop. According to a report by BioDimensions Inc., the majority of the sweet sorghum being grown today is used to make sorghum syrup, and grown and produced by fairly small farmers who sell it locally.

So how does this unique crop fit into the biofuels equation? Sweet sorghum can be crushed and the sugar extracted to produce ethanol while the remaining bagasse can be burned to create steam for power and process heat, with excess power sold to the grid. Sweet sorghum has an obvious advantage because its sugar content requires fewer and cheaper enzymes for conversion than corn starch. However, the juice is perishable and it needs to be immediately fermented.

Countries with abundant, low-cost labor, notably India, China, Brazil and the Philippines, are commercially using sweet sorghum as a rural-scale biofuel feedstock, converting the readily fermentable sugars to ethanol. Logistics and the lack of infrastructure are just some of the obstacles to its use at the current time in the U.S. But, as they say, Rome was not built in a day and the promise is there.

BioDimensions, a Memphis, Tenn.-based business development group, is one of many companies working with sweet sorghum. They are currently installing a pilot plant in west Tennessee that will be running in the fall. They intend to harvest, crush and process 175 acres of sweet sorghum, running five days a week from September through December. A portion of the sugars will be fermented to ethanol, while the bagasse will be evaluated for both fuel pellets and animal feed. The group expects to distill about 5,000 gallons of hydrous ethanol, much of which will be used in an industrial ethanol engine, supplied by collaborator AmeriFuels LLC, to power the on-site roll mill which will extract the sweet sorghum juice from the cane.

There are incentives for using sorghum to make ethanol. The Bioenergy Program for Advanced Biofuels (Section 9005) program has boosted markets by encouraging ethanol plants to use sorghum. The Biomass Crop Assistance Program assists with the establishment, collection, harvest, transportation and storage of biomass crops for bioenergy production. This program could help establish sweet sorghum production as a feedstock. Companies that use sorghum for ethanol can actually be compensated just for using the feedstock. Sorghum’s lower input costs and incentives from BCAP could give farmers and ethanol producers a distinct advantage in using sweet sorghum.

Those involved in pilot projects surrounding sweet sorghum are a shining example of the ingenuity and innovation that is a hallmark of the ethanol industry. In fact, Case IH and John Deere both have harvesting equipment under development that they report is performing well in tests which will help advance commercial scale production of sweet sorghum. While this is not the traditional route for sweet sorghum, these changes should not be viewed as a threat, but as an opportunity. In the words of the 19th century minister William Pollard, “Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.”

Bill Greving is the chairman of the United Sorghum Checkoff Program. Reach him at wand@ruraltel.net.