Sweet sorghum

Sweet sorghum

　　Sweet sorghum is a highly valuable economic crop. It was introduced from Henan in the 1970s and planted in areas such as Jinping in Zhaotong City, once expanding to around 20,000 mu. The average yield per mu is about 250 kilograms, which can be used for distilling liquor with an alcohol yield as high as 55%. In addition, each mu can yield about 1,000 kilograms of sweet sorghum stalks, with a sugar content of around 13%, and a sugar extraction rate of about 11%. The leaves, excluding the stalks, can be used as silage feed. The income from just the seeds and stalks alone is higher than that from planting common grain crops. Sweet sorghum is characterized by its frog resistance, tolerance to poor soil, strong tillering ability, high yield, thick stalks, and high sugar content. Over 85% of the land in the Zhaotong area is dryland, making it particularly suitable for cultivation in certain arid and infertile areas, especially in some impoverished mountainous regions. Appropriately developing sweet sorghum serves both as a food crop and an economic crop, allowing for increased income through sugar production — achieving two goals at once. In the past few years, sweet sorghum in Zhaotong City has not been developed due to two main reasons: first, the lack of timely scientific and technical guidance, and the difficulty of threshing not being resolved promptly; second, the lack of collaboration among relevant departments in promoting the development of sweet sorghum, which affected farmers’ enthusiasm for planting it. Sweet sorghum is a crop of great value all around, and active measures should be taken to emphasize its development. (Zhaotong)