The sweet sorghum varieties M-81E and Topper just began heading early this week (July 14). Meanwhile, the Dale and Theis varieties are moving along nicely. In the first picture, you can see the maturity differences between the Dale and M-81E varieties. The Dale and Theis varieties are currently in the soft dough and late milk stage of growth, respectively. We will target the early hard dough stage of growth for our harvest time because we are only interested in the total fermentable sugar content of the stalk and not the actual grain yield. It looks like we will have to have two different harvest dates for the four varieties because of the maturity differences that exist. The Dale and Theis varieties should be ready for harvest next week. We will have several good pictures of the harvest in the coming weeks.
In the second picture, you can see the M-81E sweet sorghum variety on the left with a commonly grown grain sorghum hybrid on the right. Typically, sweet sorghum can grow 10 – 12 feet tall while currently grown grain sorghum hybrids are generally bred to be less than 4 feet tall. This picture really puts into perspective the height differences of the two crops. Until next week…