Across the Great Plains, US farmers are turning to a little-known grain called sorghum for relief from a two-year slump in agriculture prices.
A kernel-yielding stalk that’s native to Africa, sorghum has three things going for it right now: it’s cheap to plant; it holds up better in drought-like conditions than other crops; and most importantly, demand is soaring in China, where farmers feed the plant to their hog herds, and moonshiners make it into a whiskey-like liquor called baijiu.
While corn, soybeans and wheat slumped into bear markets last year amid a global supply glut, sorghum prices have held stable.
“As far as an alternative crop, it’s so much better than anything else right now,” said Clayton Short, a 53-year-old farmer in Assaria, Kansas.
Short plans to sow sorghum on 650 acres this year, an increase of about 30 per cent from 2014 and the most in the six decades that his family has been growing the grain. Overall in the US, sorghum plantings will climb to the most in seven years, a jump made possible in part by cutbacks on corn and cotton, a Bloomberg survey showed.
Exports of sorghum from the US, the world’s top grain shipper, are headed for the most in 35 years with most of it going to China, government data show. The Asian nation began tapping foreign suppliers in recent years to meet growing consumption by the world’s largest hog herd. The US Grains Council estimates 10 per cent of China’s imports are used to make baijiu, a 100-proof grain alcohol that is the most-consumed booze in the world.
Bloomberg News, edited by ESM
