Sorghum and Soil Health: Evaluating a Climate-Smart Crop and a Field Monitoring Tool Kit by a Small Farm Network in the Hudson Valley

The Carbon Sponge Hub at White Feather Farm in Saugerties, NY, is supporting small farms in the Hudson Valley of New York trial climate-smart crops within a regenerative framework and employ off-the-shelf tools for self-monitoring soil. This is a farm-led initiative and a peer-to-peer farmer network for learning, sharing, and evaluating agroecological practices. With climate emergency a reality and not some far-off scenario, we are moving to adopt crops that can thrive despite extreme weather fluctuations, serve as a staple food for local populations, and last in storage for several years or more. Farmers need to balance managing crops through unpredictable weather while also cultivating soil for the future. Since 2021, we have grown white-grain annual sorghum across ten small farms and are excited by its potential to support food and soil security in our region. The focus of this grant is to continue to trial and evaluate sorghum while also validating our suite of soil-monitoring tools.

Sorghum, an ancient grain from East Africa where it remains a staple food, is heat-loving, drought-tolerant, and grows in many soil types. It has deep roots and produces a large amount of above-ground biomass, factors that increase potential for soil carbon storage. It is also a C4 plant, meaning it uses light, water, and nutrients more efficiently than most crops to fix carbon dioxide. For all these reasons, it is considered an important climate-smart crop. Sorghum can be harvested for its grain as well as its stalk juice (which can be evaporated into syrup), making it a valuable dual-purpose crop. Sorghum is not common in the Northeast, and when it is grown, farmers often use it for silage or select sorghum sudangrass for summer cover crop. The U.S. is the top sorghum producer and exporter in the world, but production mostly occurs in Kansas and Texas, and a large portion of the grain is exported to China for animal feed (Sawe; “Foreign Demand”). 

There is significant opportunity to grow sorghum in new regions of the U.S., like the Hudson Valley, to take advantage of the plant’s ability to adapt to a wide range of conditions, provide ecosystem services on farms, including increasing soil organic carbon, while generating revenue. Rather than focusing on industrial scale or global revenue streams, a farmer in the Hudson Valley can integrate sorghum into a market garden and sell directly to consumers through existing farmer’s markets and CSAs. Small farmers can pool their harvests to sell in larger quantities to local bakers, restaurants, and breweries. In Heather Coiner’s “Growing Grain Handbook,” she describes the industrial consolidation of grain farming in the U.S. and challenges for smaller scale operations, but also points to opportunities for small farmers who clean, bag, and market their grain directly to a baker-miller. They can charge 6-10 times the price than if sold straight from the field and double that if sold at a farmer’s market. Entering the grain market is possible for small farmers who leverage higher prices and partners with neighboring farmers (2-4).    

With the support of a Farmer Grant, we will document a year of sorghum production at five Hub farms from field preparation and planting through harvest to market. We will trial the same varieties, enabling us to consolidate harvest, and share specialized equipment, yet each farm has different physical conditions, cultivation preferences and individual needs making their story unique. We are focused on white-seeded grain sorghum because it is more palatable and nutritious than colored grains with higher tannins. We will produce a final report with five case studies to share with other small farmers interested in growing cover crops as a cash crop and entering grain production. We will outline where we think future research and investments are needed to grow and sell sorghum successfully in our region.

In addition, the grant will support the continuation and validation of our on-farm testing with the Carbon Sponge Kit. Alongside farmer testing, we will send soil and plant samples to the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Services and Logan Labs, organizations with which we already work. In consultation with Dr. Perl Egendorf, we will analyze results and evaluate the accuracy and usefulness of the Kit. We will make recommendations for specific tests and targets for farmers interested in regenerative sorghum production taking into consideration ease of use, labor, and costs. We aim to better define how sorghum is climate-smart in our region and provide recommendations for incorporating annual sorghum on small farms with equal emphasis on crop yield and soil health.