Lost Crops of Africa Volume I: Grains (1996) / Chapter Skim
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9 Sorghum: Commercial Types
9 Sorghum: Commercial Types
Pages 159-176
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From page 159... ...
As with other crops, sorghum deserves the attention that governments give to any basic food commodity: stockpiling, purchase of surpluses, price supports, research, and policy support, for instance. One particular restraint on sorghum has been the lack of processed foods flour, meal, breads, or other materials for use by those who are not farmers and are not prepared to devote hours of every day making flour from raw grain.
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From page 160... ...
In addition, sorghum flour is used in the manufacture of plywood and gypsum to build houses as well as in the refining process of potash and aluminum. Some of the ethanol used to fuel American cars is made from grain sorghum.
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From page 161... ...
SORGHUM: COMMERCIAL TYPES 161 Sorghum harvest on the High Plains of Texas.
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From page 162... ...
In fact, in Botswana sorghum meal is already commercially available. Nigeria, too, is pioneering the processing of locally grown sorghum to replace imported grains (see box)
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From page 163... ...
It provides seeds of hundreds of types that are not only productive and adaptable, but also contain genetic resistance to insects and diseases and have desirable food qualities. Of the 1,300 lines in the program, more than 400 have been "converted" as of 19,91.4 These select lines are being used to develop gene pools from which breeders can draw genotypes that best fit their local needs and environments.
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From page 164... ...
America's grain-sorghum production more than quadrupled between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, due primarily to higher productivity resulting from hybrids.
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From page 165... ...
and from the fact that the plant's heightened potentials and profits encouraged farmers to apply fertilizers and pesticides. Hybrids have produced quantum jumps in production in India and Latin America as well, but so far, except in the Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, they are uncommon in Africa itself.
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From page 166... ...
The plants are taller than their dwarfed parents 6 The elite materials were from Texas A&M University and ICRISAT and mainly comprised types developed in the Sorghum Conversion Project. The maicillos criollos were collected throughout Honduras, Guatemala, and E1 Salvador.
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From page 167... ...
In other words, their seed arises from a nonfertilized nucleus, and for this reason each plant produces progeny genetically identical to itself. This special clonal propagation through seed retains the benefits of hybrid performance while not requiring a highly developed industry to produce and distribute seed each year.
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From page 168... ...
South African studies indicate that iron is 12 times more available in sorghum beer then in a boiled sorghum gruel; riboflavin may be almost twice and thiamine almost a third more available; niacin's availability remains unchanged. In principle, 2 liters of
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From page 169... ...
The boiling water gelatinizes the starch, rendering it readily hydrolyzable by the malt amylase enzymes. t These beers are safer to drink than water because, at consumption, their pH is between 3 and 4, an acidity level at which no common pathogenic microorganisms grow.
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From page 170... ...
For sorghum breeders of all stripes, vybrids offer exciting potential. Sexual types can be used in the normal way to develop hybrids with superior characteristics and then induced into apomictic forms that will retain the new qualities, generation after generation, from then on.
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From page 171... ...
and local cultivars in Niger. The pernicious parasite occurs only among the striga-susceptible local type (right)
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From page 172... ...
The final result was a cornucopia of various sorghums all broadly adaptable to various daylengths, all short in stature, and all early maturing. Out of the myriad tall, slow, and sensitive types, suitable only for small farms in the tropics, have come universally useful types for use throughout the world, on any scale.
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From page 173... ...
· Improved flavor · Greater digestibility · Expanded diversity for food products (notably specialty types for convenience foods) Materials from the sorghum conversion program are already helping transform this formerly obscure and often scorned grain into a major contributor to world food supplies.
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From page 174... ...
Initially, sorghums in the United States were tall and had a harvest index of 21 or 22 percent (about the same as in the spindly subsistence types now grown in West Africa) , but careful selection, followed by intensive breeding, has reduced the internode length.
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From page 175... ...
More than 30 years ago, for example, South African researchers developed a precooked sorghum product. They slurried raw sorghum flour with water and passed it through a hot roller that both cooked and dried it.
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