Alongside a country road in rural Kentucky, it's pretty common to see rows of corn stretching all the way to the horizon, but all of those green stalks might not actually be corn plants. What you're probably looking at is sweet sorghum. Farmers in the U.S. What makes sweet sorghum especially attractive to farmers is its drought resistance. It doesn't require a lot of water, so it's an ideal crop for Deals areas that don't see a lot of rainfall, like parts of China and Africa as well as in the U.S. In fact, you can basically treat it like maple syrup in recipes, and some folks even use it to top their pancakes. Farmers also mix the leavings from making sorghum syrup into animal feed, but food for people and animals isn't the main use for Amazon Beauty sweet sorghum. It's become a cash crop since researchers discovered that we can use sorghum syrup to produce biofuels. As the U.S. suffers from crippling droughts in many of its farming regions, sweet sorghum's popularity is skyrocketing. Data has been g enerat ed by GS A Conten t Ge ne rator DEMO.
Sweet sorghum farming used to take place mainly in the southeast United States, but now farmers in the Corn Belt are jumping on the sorghum train as droughts destroy their corn crops. Sorghum syrup producers crush the stalk to extract the sweet juice, just like sugar cane. You can use sorghum syrup to replace other liquid sweeteners, like honey, molasses, maple syrup or even white sugar in recipes, though on its own sorghum syrup is more like maple syrup than any of these other sweeteners. The trick to substituting sorghum syrup for other sweeteners is knowing what ratio to use. You can substitute sorghum syrup in place of maple syrup or corn syrup in recipes using a one-to-one ratio, but for other sweeteners, you may need to adjust your recipe slightly. The National Sweet Sorghum Producers & Processors Association has a handy list of some common sweeteners and the ratios to use when you want to replace them with sorghum syrup.
We've been cooking with sorghum syrup for hundreds of years, but what's really made this crop catch on in recent years is its potential as a biofuel to replace or supplement petroleum in our fuel supply.S. Traditionally, corn has been the biofuel crop of choice, but sweet sorghum is a much more versatile plant. Not only is it extremely drought tolerant, but as Christopher DeMorro, site director at Gas 2.0, an alternative energy Web site, points out, "What makes it really interesting is that sweet sorghum can be grown in a wide variety of temperate and tropical areas." That versatility and its drought tolerance mean that farmers are starting to plant more sweet sorghum, especially for snackdeals.shop ethanol and biodiesel production. Producing regular ethanol produces greenhouse gas emissions. Producing biodiesel -- as opposed to ethanol -- from sweet sorghum is an even more recent development. The big advantage over ethanol, DeMorro says is that any diesel car can run biodiesel with minimal modifications.
As gas prices continue to rise, biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel are becoming more attractive, and finding new crops to produce biodiesel is going to be critical to our energy future. The main reason that we've relied so heavily on corn for biofuel in the U.S. What makes sweet sorghum even more attractive than corn for producing biofuels is that it answers some of the controversial questions surrounding biofuel production and its social and environmental impacts. For every acre of land growing corn for biofuel, that's one less acre of land growing food for people. There's also the impact of growing the crop itself. Farming can be extremely water-intensive, which is a big deal when so many areas are struggling with drought. You also have to consider the impact that crop production has on the soil. The most well-known issue with biofuels is probably the food versus fuel problem. Just as with corn, growing sweet sorghum to produce fuel means that much less land to produce food, but thanks to a new hybrid sorghum plant, sweet sorghum could provide the best of both worlds.
People can eat the grain and juice the stalks to create biofuel. Conventional sweet sorghum doesn't do double duty like this, but this new hybrid could be the solution. Sweet sorghum is also much more water-efficient than most biofuel crops. Producing ethanol from sweet sorghum uses about two thirds the amount of water of corn and one seventh the water of sugar cane. That's a big deal in drought-stricken areas both here in the U.S. Like any other crop, sweet sorghum has some drawbacks. There's the problem of mono-cropping: planting the same crop in the same fields year after year. The solution to this problem is rotating the crops, giving the land a "break" every two years and planting something complementary like alfalfa to help improve the soil. Grain sorghum (not the sweet kind) can be processed into flour and used for baking. I'm sort of a food nerd, and when I first learned that I'd be researching sweet sorghum, the first thing that came to mind was articles I'd read about sorghum crops helping farmers fight hunger in Africa.