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

Commodities

• Agronomic: sorghum (milo), sorghum (sweet)
• Miscellaneous: syrup

Practices

• Crop Production: cover crops, double cropping, varieties and cultivars
• Education and Training: farmer to farmer, on-farm/ranch research
• Farm Business Management: cooperatives
• Natural Resources/Environment: carbon sequestration
• Production Systems: agroecosystems
• Soil Management: soil quality/health
• Sustainable Communities: local and regional food systems, new business opportunities

The Carbon Sponge Hub at White Feather Farm will lead a network
of five small farms in New York’s Hudson Valley region to
continue to trial and evaluate white-grain, annual sorghum for
yield and changes in soil health while also evaluating a suite of
off-the-shelf field monitoring tools, referred to as the Carbon
Sponge Kit. Sorghum is an underutilized crop with great potential
as both human food and a climate-smart crop capable of helping
sequester carbon in soil. Farmers in regions where sorghum has
not been widely grown, like the Hudson Valley, can take advantage
of the plant’s ability to adapt to a wide range of conditions and
provide ecosystem services on farms — especially increasing soil
organic carbon — while also generating revenue. Alongside Kit
testing, we will send samples to two professional labs and work
with a soil scientist to analyze results. We aim to endorse
specific tests and carbon targets for farmers interested in
regenerative agriculture. A major goal of the Carbon Sponge Hub
is to help change the profile of sorghum in the U.S., including
where it is grown, how it is grown and what it is used for. A
comprehensive outreach program includes a final report featuring
five case studies including recommendations for how to
incorporate annual sorghum as a cash crop on a small farm and
priorities for future research and investments. We will host
public workshops and community volunteer days at two farms to
share progress as well as promote easy-to-access online
resources.

The primary objective of this proposal is for a network of small
farmers in the Hudson Valley of New York to continue to work
together to evaluate annual white-grain sorghum for crop yield
and soil health. We are selecting five farms for this study with
conditions, priorities, and needs distinctive from each other,
allowing us to document a range of approaches for growing sorghum
and serve as case studies in a final report. From this
experience, we will be able to outline priorities for future
research and investments. Sharing our process, from planting to
market along with successes and failures, will support other
small farmers to grow sorghum and help expand the New York
Grainshed. We will continue to collect data at regular intervals
with our suite of off-the-shelf tools for soil health assessment,
and simultaneously sample soil and plants for analysis at two
professional labs. This aids us in our secondary objective: to
verify the accuracy of the Carbon Sponge Kit and make data
collection recommendations for farmers wanting to balance crop
yield and soil health. We will draft preliminary best practices
for regenerative sorghum production in our region that is backed
by farmer experience and data.