ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Saturday, July 2, 2005 7:00 pm
As a grain sorghum researcher, Ismail Dweikat sees himself as hard at work on what many Nebraska farmers would regard as "a poor man's crop." But Dweikat is on the edge of an important breakthrough in test plots at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And he thinks his results could propel drought-hardy grain sorghum back into the more glamorous, but also much thirstier, company of corn and soybeans.
"We're almost there," he said, "because we already have eight lines of large-seeded sorghum released" into commercial channels.
Cream-colored sorghum varieties brought in from Africa and crossed with Johnson grass are the base for several kinds of progress.
n Larger, heavier sorghum berries that produce bigger yields and stronger seed stock.
n Cold tolerance to fend off the effects of frost.
n More resistance to dreaded chinch bugs.
n Earlier planting dates to capture the benefits of April showers.
n Earlier harvest to escape the yield-sapping effects of frost at that end of the growing season.
"It would be considered a big incentive for farmers to grow sorghum," the native of Palestine said, "if we could increase the yield to compete with corn."
Dweikat's optimism might seem misplaced at a time when the federal government has just delivered its 2005 report on acres of spring-planted crops in Nebraska.
The field space farmers assigned to corn was up 2 percent to 8.4 million acres, according to the Nebraska Agricultural Statistics Service. Soybeans were up 4 percent to a record 5 million acres. Grain sorghum was down 29 percent to a paltry 390,000 acres the lowest since 1952.
But Dweikat doesn't expect this pattern to last.
There might be what he also described as an image problem, "but I think farmers should understand, when they're planting sorghum, they don't need to water it. And we're not going to have water forever."
Still, getting farmers to change course is no small task.
Despite ample signs of depleted water resources across the state, they grew 61 percent of their corn and 46 percent of their soybeans under irrigation last year.
Total acres of irrigated soybeans are up to 2.2 million from 685,000 in 1990. And the combined, irrigated total for corn and soybeans of 7.2 million acres is up from 5.735 million since 1990, according to the Lincoln-based agricultural statistics service.
Victor Bohuslavsky of the Nebraska Soybean Board doesn't think soybeans have hit the ceiling yet in a long surge in total acres.
"There's just so many new things we're finding we can do with them," Bohuslavsky said. "And I guess you can attribute that to all the research that's out there."
Indeed, the vast disparity in research emphasis between sorghum and more popular crops also helps define the size of the sales job for sorghum advocates.
Dweikat said there are at least 500 corn breeders and geneticists in the United States.
The number of people working on grain sorghum: "Maybe 36, 37," he said.
"Billions more dollars go to corn research than to sorghum, too."
In fact, university research on grain sorghum is largely confined to Nebraska, Kansas, Texas and Indiana.
But the man who knows the advantages that go with more mainstream crops sounds undeterred. Grain sorghum advocates will just have to be more assertive about the gains they're making.
"I think it's just a matter of education," he said. "And us needing to go and keep hassling the farmer."
Unlike chinch bugs, farmers may discover sorghum researchers to be a very beneficial kind of pest.
Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or at ahovey@alltel.net.