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Overview: Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor)
Sorghum is a grass in the same family as corn and sugarcane. It was domesticated about 5,000 years ago, and nearly all of its genetic material comes from varieties that were originally cultivated in Africa. Today, sorghum is a food staple in many parts of Africa and Asia.
One of the main advantages of sorghum is that it is very drought tolerant. Along with millet, it is planted by African farmers in dry and marginal areas as a hedge against famine. Just as corn, cocoa, rubber, potatoes, and other crops were taken from the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia, sorghum was brought to the colonies from Africa.
Food for slaves, later animal feed
It is thought that it was brought from Africa to the Caribbean, where it was grown to feed slaves (DeWalt and Barkin 1987). It subsequently spread to Central, South, and North America. By the nineteenth century, sorghum was grown over much of the Great Plains as a drought-tolerant animal feed.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station were working together in Chillicothe, Texas, to introduce and test different varieties of sorghum.
During this period researchers bred and selected new lines of sorghum that were higher yielding, mechanically harvestable, resistant to disease, and adapted to a wider range of climatic conditions (DeWalt and Barkin 1987).
In the 1960s and 1970s the DeKalb Seed Company began to develop lines of high-yield sorghum. They intended for Great Plains farmers to adopt these lines when the climate changed, or when the aquifers that they were using to irrigate corn dried up. That has not yet happened; instead, the new varieties were exported to much of Central and South America, Africa, and Asia.