For milo growers, new year brings seed shortage

Area sorghum producers are greeting the new year facing shortages of seed, a legacy of the past year’s drought.
“We’ve actually been short for three years now on the varieties that topped our trials,” said Burl Scherler, a farmer and seed dealer on the Central Plains of Eastern Colorado. “We need the short season varieties; we can’t plant anything else around here. Last year, the producers who went with something longer season were really disappointed.”
Grain sorghum is grown in 14 states, but historically Kansas and Texas are the top two producers; the heart of the sorghum-growing belt was hit hard by last summer’s drought. Already on a downward production trend, total U.S. sorghum production plummeted from 345.4 million bushels in 2010 to 246 million in 2011. On average, yields were down about a third from the previous year.
Scherler said much of the sorghum seed is grown under irrigation in West Texas, where some of the hottest, driest weather on record occurred last year.
“There’s plenty of long season varieties available, but they don’t tolerate our cool nights and high elevation,” he said.
Rick Kochenower, an Oklahoma State University sorghum specialist based at the Panhandle Research and Extension Center at Goodwell, added that supplies of forage or hay-grazer sorghums in particular are extremely tight.
“There’s not going to be a lot to plant to make hay or graze cattle on,” he said. “Producers need to be prepared that if they have a favorite sorghum, they might not get it this year. They need to contact their seed dealers and order soon; indications are if you wait and order seed in the spring, as normal, none will be available.”
To propagate seed, breeders plant both male and female lines, hoping to get them to pollinate at the same time, and last summer’s extreme heat made that harder to accomplish, Kochenower explained.
Though the Oklahoma panhandle received about an inch of moisture — and in some cases more — from a late December blizzard, “water sipping crops” like sorghum and cotton are expected to be in heavy demand for spring planting across the panhandles due to the return of a La Nina weather pattern, which usually indicates the persistence of drier weather. Many irrigation wells in the panhandle region are already pumping at marginal levels, and last year’s weather compounded existing water limitations.

Weed control holds back wider adoption

The seed shortages come at a time when sorghum prices are high, averaging around $6.50 per bushel in 2011, due to declining stocks and growing use as an ethanol feedstock.
Over the past three years, world grain sorghum production has fallen nearly twice as fast as world grain sorghum usage, as sorghum loses acreage to corn, according to Dan O’Brien, a Kansas State University agricultural economist.
Jerry Johnson, Colorado State University’s extension agronomist, said unless moisture is adequate to get 80-bushel yields from corn, sorghum typically outperforms it. For that reason, sorghum did better than dryland corn in his test plots at Akron this year.
Still, there’s a reason not much sorghum is grown north of Interstate 70, he says. Corn provides producers with some weed control options that sorghum does not.
“The major concern with grain sorghum is having a satisfactory weed control program,” he said. “We don’t have a Roundup-Ready grain sorghum. There are some companies working on different herbicide-resistant varieties but nothing is at the testing level yet.”
How acreage gets divvied up in the future between the two crops will depend on what happens first: better drought tolerance in corn or effective weed resistance in sorghum, Johnson said.
So far, corn appears to be ahead in that race.
“The corn seed companies all have advanced material in their variety trials,” Johnson noted.
Within the past two weeks, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service announced that it was deregulating a corn variety genetically engineered by Monsanto and BASF for drought tolerance. On-farm testing of the biotech corn is expected to begin next year.
In far eastern Colorado, Scherler said sorghum is still one of the area’s two most reliable crops, along with sunflowers. More farmers might be forced to look at planting sunflowers if they can’t get the sorghum seed they want.
Scherler recommended it as an excellent alternative.
“It’s our best money crop around here,” he said. “We can gross $700 an acre on sunflowers, and it’s not as critical in terms of what variety you plant.”