S4E18: Grain Sorghum 101 (Pt.1)

Recorded: 3/16/26 

Grain sorghum is gaining attention as a resilient, drought-tolerant crop with potential to diversify crop rotations across Pennsylvania. But how well does it really fit our climate and management systems? In this episode, Justin and Dwane are joined by Dale Stoltzfus, sorghum grower and owner of Specialty Grains LLC, to explore the opportunities and challenges of growing grain sorghum in Pennsylvania.

Hosts: Justin Brackenrich and Dwane Miller, Penn State Extension
Guest: Dale Stoltzfus

Links:
Specialty Grains
Sorghum: Herbicide Options and Considerations if Corn Crop Fails

Sponsor:
Call/text Mark  1-618-521-6805

Photo credit: Ryan Spelman

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Transcript

Justin Brackenrich (00:18)
Welcome to another episode of the Agronomy Highlights podcast. I will be your host today Justin Brackenrich and I'm joined by my colleague and co-host Dwayne Miller. Dwayne, how are you today?

Justin Brackenrich (00:28)
I'm doing well, Justin. How are you doing?

Justin Brackenrich (00:31)
I'm doing

really good. I'm excited for this episode. I'm excited to learn more about it. And then I think we're looking into some new topics and trying to get people some other different education. I think that kind of hopefully charges everyone else up as much as it does us.

Justin Brackenrich (00:45)
Yeah, this definitely is a different topic that we haven't dove into at all, and I think folks are going to be really interested in it. We're going to start talking about green sorghum. And we've got a great guest, very well versed in sorghum. Justin, you said too, he comes very well recommended.

Justin Brackenrich (01:04)
yeah. Yeah. So I actually met Dale years ago, working on the forage and grassland council. Dale was a board member of that, I cycled off. So when we started researching grain sorghum, you we realized that Dale is on the national sorghum checkoff board. He's got his, his companies and we'll talk about specialty grain LLC, but he has a bunch of others and is doing a really good job providing education to not only Pennsylvania, but I think a lot of the region.

on Sorghum Production.

Justin Brackenrich (01:33)
Yeah, absolutely. a little partial to me because he's also from Schuylkill County where I come from. And I've known Dale for a lot, number of years, both as a farmer and now in, as he has spun off and developed these LLCs to deal with, whether it's grain sorghum, whether it's selling seeds and chemicals and farming on the side. So

Dale's got his hands in a lot of different things and he seems to do them real well, particularly in the sorghum end. So I'm anxious to hear him and talk to him about what he's got going on for sorghum and teach us too.

Justin Brackenrich (02:11)
So let's get it started. I think we're lucky to have him. not take up, know, everybody's anxious about learning about grain sorghum. So good morning, Dale. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. How are you?

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (02:21)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Really excited to talk about sorghum production and how I got into it to start out with. This goes back almost 15 years ago, if I remember correctly, it was right around 2013 was the first year I put sorghum out. And at that point, there was no other growers really in the area that I knew of that were growing grain sorghum.

I was working with a crop consultant. came up with a plan of how to do it. I was a new seed dealer at the time. We had it in our seed lineup and I decided to throw a couple acres out because I had some ground that quite frankly, I didn't know what else to plant in it because the deer pressure was so bad. So we threw grain sorghum in those acres. Fast forward.

That year we did okay. The next year we had a phenomenal year with grain sorghum. And then I came into two years that we had very mediocre years with it that I was almost ready to hang it up because there was just so little information that I had to go off of to grow it. we were, so that was it the fourth year into it. And

I kept digging into more information, trying to find more information, how we can grow it here in the East coast. At that point, we had no herbicide tolerant varieties, so grass was a real problem. I think we're further on into the episode here, we'll probably talk more about herbicide tolerance. just kept digging into it more. Then I started coming up with...

were selling seeds, so had customers that were asking about growing it.

they were wondering where should they market it? Or will you buy it from me? Well, till then I had my drawing facility here. had capability to purchase it. We had a truck scale on site. And I was like, yeah, I'll buy it from you. started digging into the markets. that's actually what, that's where specialty greens actually grew out of then was from those early years of being.

of requests to actually purchase grain sorghum from customers. Dale, you just let's set the stage a little bit. I'm going to plug this one because you're a Schuylkill County proud person, you know, as I am too, right? But for our listeners, just tell us a little bit about where you're farming, how many how many acres you're growing, what kind of crops you're doing in addition to sorghum, grain sorghum.

So I do run a very diverse operation. We are located in the southwest corner of Schuylkill County. So we're not the high elevation of Schuylkill County.

I have over the years actually basically shifted all my acres, what would be corn acres into grain sorghum. And the interesting thing is the reason why I had done that is it's a dollars and cents thing. logistics wise with storage, it's easier for me to store a couple of crops instead of being able to store a lot of different crops. I don't have enough of bin space to store a lot of different crops.

And then when I was, you know, I'm doing this now almost 15 years. And when I look at a five year average, in a five year average, three of the years grain sorghum will pay better with the type ground I have. Two out of those years, grain sorghum will pay very similar to corn. On a very good year, corn will come up and pay the same as grain sorghum.

And I've done cash flows on this. I've watched, you know, years different, quite a number of different years on this now. And it comes out and I mean, we're beyond the 10 year average on it now. it just two years ago, I put corn out and grains were going to pay better that year. Guess what I'm not doing now? I'm not growing corn again. just in the type ground I have. And I want to highlight that it's a type ground I'm farming. It's what makes more sense.

you getting better soils, it's, foreign probably will pay better on better dirt.

Justin Brackenrich (06:21)
So that's one of the things we've talked a lot about recently is, and I don't want to wander too much, but anyone who listens knows that's kind of our thing, is the importance of cash flowing or sharpening your pencil and putting it to paper and making sense of these changes, right? If something's not making you money, is it something you should still be doing? Probably not, or at least not this year, right? It shouldn't be part of that. So I think it's really good for people to hear that someone

and your position doing this is actually taking those steps, cash flowing, doesn't make sense, and then you're able to make management changes with different crops to show that.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (06:58)
And I agree. Like you said, Justin, this is kind of a theme for us this year is like, all right, let's let's take a step back and look at this. so many of us in agriculture and maybe myself included as a farmer. Why are you doing this? Well, we did it last year. You know, this is what we do. We just do the same thing and hope for a different result. Like you said, Dale, right. You pencil it out. And it is tough.

And I'm with you. I'm farming some of that same challenging soil. We've got a lot of shale to deal with. We've got a lot of deer pressure. We have that drought. And just going through and saying, well, you know, we're going to, we're going to plant corn and beans again, isn't maybe necessarily the best option for us. I actually run a very diverse operation as far as the amount of crops I grow, which

makes it more difficult in management. I actually like to look at farm profitability, each individual farm and the crop I grow on that farm, not as an operation altogether. There are some farms that I try to keep in hay. And quite frankly, when I'm growing hay, I'm looking at rotating hay out every three to four years. I don't keep them longer than that. And this could be a whole episode in itself.

about looking at profitability. If you lose one ton of yield in your hay market and your hay is at $200 a ton, that's $200 an acre of profit you're losing and it costs about $100 an acre to replant. You can't keep hay fuels for a long time. this is a funny trail, I realize this, but it's a passion I have to help farmers become more profitable. that's back to where we were at with grain sorghum.

It's an important piece of farm profitability in our marginal dirt. Another crop that I rely heavily on is small grains. I really want to bring oats back to the area because oats do well, especially as we get into higher elevations, our test weights tend to come up. We do oats for certified seed.

So, and we've been doing very well. It's just hard to come to that 38 pound test weight that the car or the, our market's demanding. Wheat has done, wheat's actually one of my most profitable cash crops. And even last year, wheat management has become, wheat has become a thing that takes a lot of intense management, but it will pay you back.

I'm fortunate enough we have a grain cleaning facility here because we process seed, certified seed. And I've cleaned quite a few thousand bushels of wheat this year to make it pass for flour grade that was feed grade. So I'm fortunate in that. It also adds value to my grain sorghum market because we do some re-cleaning of grain sorghum.

and that all lumps under specialty grains as well. It's actually part of the thing that grew specialty grains out was the seed processing side of it. So a little more on specialty grains. actually market clean and market sunflowers as well. So it's also another option of a crop to grow and that could be another topic for later, I believe. So.

It all intertwines with each other. I realize this isn't a farm profitability episode, but it all intertwines really, really well together when you look at some of these specialty crops like grain sorghum and place them correctly. One other important factor is make sure you work with someone that knows these crops.

that can help you with growing them in the best way to bring the result that you want. Because I've worked with a number of guys that had worked with other people before and did not have success with it. And then it gives a bad name to the crop because it did not work. So the importance of working with the right person is important.

Justin Brackenrich (10:50)
Dale I was trying to keep notes as we were talking I've got as corn beans hay sunflower sorghum grain sorghum wheat oats, you know, that's a pretty strong Option for rotation and and cropping right? So just off of what we talked about here. We're looking at like seven different Different crops that you have it and I think the interesting part is We've talked a lot about the challenges that each one of them brings right you you mentioned

hay depleting yield after three years. We talked about wheat and we talked about oats and low test weight and corn and beans and deer pressure. What we haven't done or talked about any of the challenges or problems that come along with sorghum. So maybe I'm going to assume that there are none, that this is our miracle silver bullet crop, right? So let's jump into this as the alternative to sorghum. And I'll kind of give you...

As listeners while we're here is I hear a lot of my producers that I'm working with saying I think I'm going to try sorghum because I've got so much pressure. We're getting so droughty. My soil is not good. And I think this conversation and kind of segue myself to it is we're talking to someone that's an expert in growing sorghum and this idea of you get out what you put in. But maybe sorghum is a wonderful crop and we don't have to deal with that as much. So I'd like to start with

Can you just explain to us what a sorghum plant looks like? Because maybe we haven't all seen it, or if we did, maybe we don't recognize that because there's a forage sorghum, there's a grain sorghum. Maybe just a little bit of that physiology plant structure, anything that you could share with us to help kind of put an image in our minds.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (12:24)
So planting sorghum, initially when it comes up, it looks like a really weak corn plant. It looks like a small version of a corn plant, but much smaller. I mean, look at a sorghum seed size is the size of a BB and a corn seed size. You're not gonna have nearly as big of a plant coming out of that sorghum seed that you do coming out of a corn plant, but it does look very similar to a corn plant. You hit on forage sorghum.

The basic difference between forage sorghum and grain sorghum is typically a forage sorghum will be a BMR brown midrib for fiber digestibility. Typically it'll be a taller plant. Well, it will be a taller plant. The interesting thing is in the forage sorghum side, and we need to hit forage sorghum too because I forage sorghum is a underutilized crop in Pennsylvania.

So maybe we could hit forage sorghum. But primarily a lot of the forage sorghums we do are actually a radic dwarf variety that we sell. So you don't have problem with lodging. So they'll get about six to seven feet tall. Whereas a grain sorghum only gets about 48 inches tall is a very tall grain sorghum. So that's basically the plant. I always tell guys when you plant your sorghum,

planned it and maybe don't look at it for a little bit because it'll come out of the ground and it'll look spindly. It'll look really slow and it doesn't actually grow real quick when you first planned it just because it's the characteristic of it. So the plant comes up and it tends to actually want to tiller out, which actually slows that plant growth out or slows it down a little bit.

So that's a basic look of what a plant, of what a sorghum plant will look

Justin Brackenrich (14:14)
So it's kind of like the opposite of corn, right? I tell people I think corn looks the best the week it comes out of the ground, right? And everything from there is kind of downhill. Soybeans, you you're best to plant them and look back in June and see what's going on there because you're usually very, so it's kind of a nice balance between those. It's good to know. So it is a monocot, right? So it's a grass. falls in a similar category to our corn. So, Duane, what are you thinking? Where do we go from here?

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (14:40)
I'm

going back to, know, dad used to use the term Milo. So Dale, is Milo and grains sorghum, are they interchange, are they the same thing? They're exactly, and that's actually an excellent thing to bring up because yes, they are exactly the same thing. Milo is actually a slang term for grains sorghum. Okay. I say it this way, Milo's my it's low. Basically where that terminology came from in the West.

Milo was always looked at or I actually call it Milo more than I call it grain sorghum to tell you the truth. But in the West that term came out because it was always sort of looked at as the down and under crop. The crop you would always put on the poor acres because and then the price was always lower than corn around here. That is not true thanks to the market that we're selling into.

That's where Milo came from, the name Milo came from. Okay.

Justin Brackenrich (15:35)
And so now that we've been indoctrinated in like a Sorghum podcast, can we start using the term Milo, Duane, and look like, you know, we've really been there. really smart. We're we're very hands on progressive people.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (15:46)
I've heard a lot of people in that Midwestern region use that term more so than and but maybe the old timers around here but that that

One other one that I've heard people talk about in a Sorghum standpoint is sweet Sorghum. And that is different too, correct? Any knowledge on sweet? Yes, it is. you don't, I mean, I hear people referencing that. It's more, I'm going to say it's more the old timers that I hear talking about that. And you do have a Sorghum.

that they use and I don't actually quite honestly I don't know where it's grown but it's used as to make syrup. Okay. product. My limited knowledge as well was that I heard that sweet sorghum was actually used to make a

Justin Brackenrich (17:49)
So Dale, now that we're, know, Dwayne thankfully opened this bag so we can ask questions that we don't know the answers to and we can get answers, right? We've crushed the threshold of having to look like we know things. When we're thinking about corn silage, similar to, or excuse me, corn, similar to forage or sorghum, there's a corn grain, there's a corn silage, there's a grain sorghum, there's a forage sorghum. But sometimes we often see that like dual

variety that's in corn that could go either way. Does that exist in the forage world? Or the sorghum world? The milo world, excuse me.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (18:26)
This is the way I'll say that they don't really cross in varieties. However, I'll tell you some of the things that we've been doing with grain sorghum. We will actually combine, take the heads off because we're just clipping the heads. And we will actually, if we're early, while the stalks are still green, because I have already combined sorghum. The last two years we were combining our sorghum.

You know, around 20%, some of it was on the early side just because I needed it for markets. But the stalks were actually grass green yet and a lot of stalks there. We actually started taking some of those acres and mowing the stalks off and making balage off of it or chopping it to feed mama cows. And it gives a tremendous amount of forage. It's a good way if we want to plant weed after it to clean the fields off and get rid of the stalks.

because they do not dry down fast. It's an extremely wet stalk and they do not dry down well to do dry fodder in the fall. So how do you clean the fields off or how do you get the wheat planted? I'll add this onto it too. The interesting thing I've found is, vomitoxin does not seem to carry from the stalk. So I don't have any scientific data to back this up, but what I've seen is

In my operation, I can no till wheat into my lower grain sorghum stalks and not have any more vomit toxin issues than what I do going into soybean stalks, which is not true with corn. Correct. Wow. That's a great point. And I hadn't seen any literature or anything to that effect, but you know, just kind of winding up winter meeting season here and I was going over some ear rots and

telling people, right, if you've got gibberella ear rot, be ready for vom and wheat. That relationship is there and great point, great point. Which we don't seem to have some of the diseases that we struggle with in corn that go into grain sorghum, although they are sister plants.

it seems like we have a lot more resistance still in the grain sorghum to disease. The diseases differ, I'll say it that way.

Justin Brackenrich (20:40)
Okay, so this is... Excuse me, go ahead, Dwane.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (20:43)
Well, so I want to go go back to the market. And to me, like I try to begin with the end in mind. So. I think it's important for us and the listeners to understand what makes this an advantageous crop, especially in in the locality farming where you're at, Dale, is is is the market, correct? That is correct. So.

I just want you to talk about the market and how it started, how has it evolved, has the market opportunities grown there over the course of the 15 years you've been growing sorghum?

So 15 years ago, when we were looking at a basis price, so all grain sorghum is paid based a basis over the corn market, Chicago board corn market. Grain sorghum does not trade, does not have its own trading board, so to say, Chicago board of trade. So it's based off of corn. When I started 15 years ago, it was a basis of 80 cents over corn.

We went as high as...

I've seen a 350 basis over, went on a short year when there wasn't enough around. But like this year, we were running a lot of a dollar 80 basis. So still really healthy basis. I liked seeing in the two and a quarter to 250 range basis. Our demand is very good in this area and it's going into the pet food and bird seed industries. Primarily is where it's being used, which

is a high demand market with a has a premium based on that market as well. We are privileged that we have three significant, there's three markets that have pretty significant size for bird seed within an hour and a half of me of Southwest

Schuylkill County. and there are, and when you go into Western side of the state, there's actually, you can go into Ohio, there's some markets, there's in very up along Lake Erie, there's a dog food plant that uses a bunch. So those markets are spread through the state and they're all premium markets. There's a dog food plant locally here again, in the Eastern part of the state that's

went from nothing a year ago to about, they're about two to three truckloads a week. It's not a high use, but it's a use. And a year ago, they weren't using any. There's a backyard poultry plant, not real far from me as well, that they doubled their use. They actually, they more or less tripled their use. They went from about a truckload a week to two to three truckloads a week. Hey, hey, Dave.

Justin Brackenrich (23:24)
Just for scale, when you say a truckload, how many bushels is that or could you translate that into acres?

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (23:31)
⁓ It's a thousand bushels. So if you use a bushels 10 acres very 100 bushel mile or grain sorghum is very very very doable in fact, okay for me anymore. It's 120 to 140 that's that's a kind of thing that over the years are My yield went up

Justin Brackenrich (23:48)
So it's within wanting two to three loads a week, if you're talking 10 acres of load, so now we're at 20 to 30 acres, do these markets saturate pretty quickly? Maybe I'm going off on a tangent, but if you're saying there are some around, are we gonna get ourselves to a point if people start switching that we don't have a use for them then?

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (24:08)
So what ends up happening basically is we may lose some basis that we have now, but every time we lose basis, now we can truck it further. So New York, Southern tier New York actually has a bunch of uses as well, or some pet food markets that are utilizing it as well. But when our basis is higher here, we can't afford to truck it there.

But there's years that we have trucked into New York as well.

So we may start losing, we may lose some basis the more acres that are planted. Yes, that is correct. And that is a fear that people have. But it seems like then when you start losing that basis and maybe some corn, some acres that could grow corn just as well and be just as profitable, we'll go back to corn. So I watched the acres go up and just sort of level off and plateau.

Because we're not using, if we don't, we never have enough in the area, frankly, we haven't yet. And if we, if we don't have enough, they just railed in. So we in a, with, all those opportunities for those markets and plants locally, we are still in a deficit. Yes. Okay. Yeah. I just find it interesting because I keep, it's the longer I'm in it and the longer I'm marketing.

Justin Brackenrich (25:11)
Okay.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (25:27)
And also with my position on the national Sorghum checkoff board, finding out there's a lot more markets out there than what I realized.

Justin Brackenrich (25:38)
Yeah,

I'm hearing of stuff now that I had no idea existed, right? Like, so, I mean, even here, and I would like to think I did a little bit of research before I got on here, but, you know, the idea that there are things closer or it's spread out across the state or even the region, ⁓ that seems promising for this as a crop.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (25:55)
Correct. So yeah, it depends where you're at. You will truck it two and three hours to get there. But it comes down to ROI. Is it better off than what you are doing now? And I've, with the position I have in marketing grain, I have connections with trucks and will tell you right up front what it's going to cost you per bushel to truck it. And it may not make sense for you to grow it because of that.

It's and it all comes and it all should come back to ROI when you're looking at specialty crops. And it needs to come back to ROI because we've got operator farms as a business. Yeah. So go back to that word specialty crop. So when I hear the word specialty crop, sometimes I'm thinking, holy cow, what am I going to have to shell out to have equipment to handle this particular specialty crop?

So if I'm thinking about growing or trying a little bit of grain sorghum, do I need anything special if I'm growing corn and beans? Do I have all the equipment I need? That's the neat part about it. I'm going to come, this is what I'm going to address first, and that's drying and storage. Every one of the facilities that purchase grain sorghum only purchase it dry. So if you do not have

a facility to try and store it, you've got to find someone that does. And that's actually why I got into what I got into is because I do that. And there's probably only that I can refer and I will. I realize it's a business I'm in, but I'm also in the business of trying to help farmers make the most money that they can. And that will mean sometimes that I will tell you to haul it somewhere else if it makes more sense.

⁓ I'm never going to tell someone to haul their grain sorghum for, I call it conditioning, past a facility that will pay them just as good as what I do. That's how I operate. So first of all, is the conditioning of it. You got to be able to dry it. You got to be able to store it. You will not combine it dry in the field. Only one year did we ever do that. And that was not this past growing season, but the one before when we were so dry in the fall.

Other than that, will never, so basically you will never drive in the field. You have to be able to drive.

Justin Brackenrich (28:11)
Can you dry this in in any commercial grain dryer is there any change that has to be made?

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (28:17)
So it does have a very, so the, I'm gonna call it the husk on it, where it's not really a husk, but when you dry it down, it creates a dust that comes off of it that is very flammable. So yes, you can dry it in any dryer, but you do wanna make sure that you are very, very, that everything is set up correctly.

that you're not gonna throw a spark, you wanna blow that dryer down on a regular basis. Especially if you're using a, I actually recommend guys to dry it as batches, not a continuous flow dryer. If you're gonna do continuous flow, make sure you're blowing that plan amount on a regular basis to keep the dust away. Because dryers will, every now and then, they'll throw out an irregular flame and it'll create a spark. And I've had,

Unfortunately, I use a top bin dryer. Not everyone's familiar with a GSI top bin dryer. They work really, really well. But I've had three different fires in that bin. The one I have no idea how it started yet. The other one was all operator error, and I know why it happened. So, drawing is one of the things. As far as planning goes,

If you have a finger meter planter, you will basically change that planter over and get the soybean meters that go in it and get the plates for grain sorghum. So they make a soybean plate, they make a grain plate. If you're running a vacuum planter, you buy the grain sorghum plates. So that's the only special equipment that you really need is on the planter side. Combining side, I love my 15 inch rows.

I love planting with a planter, not with a drill. Basically because you are only planting about six to seven, maybe eight pounds of seed per acre. A seed does a very, or a drill does a very poor job to simulate that out. A drill tends to do a skip spill method. So you tend to have your seed on top of each other and then you don't tend to get quite as good of a yield.

because of the seed all being on top of each other. Depth, seed depth, seed placement so critical with sorghum right like it is with corn. So my preference is still 15 inch rows. 30 inch rows can work as well. It's just you don't get as quick shading. I will tell anyone though, if you're trying it, let's figure out how to use the equipment you have and make it work.

before you invest that extra money into equipment that you don't know if you're going to keep on using. That's always my recommendation in that. As far as harvesting goes, no, you don't need any special equipment. Are you using, back to your planter, are you using a six row with splits? How are you handling, or do you have a wider planter on 15s?

So we do custom planning. Last year we went from an eight row to a 12 row just because we couldn't keep up with planning. I and we have, I'll be quite frank, I love technology and a planner is a really good place to invest that technology in. we are, mean, we're not running a new planner. We're running a refurbished planner with the technology added to it. So Rowshot Alls.

all that good jazz to go with it. And vacuum. I love my precision planning parts.

Justin Brackenrich (31:43)
So Dale, touched on depth. What is the preferred depth for something like this?

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (31:47)
So this is a really interesting question because I was always told to plant grain sorghum one inch deep. And then I go to start talking to my friends from the West and they're planting two inches deep. And then you talk to them again on a dry year and they say plant it in the moisture. I've heard it and I have actually two years ago when we were so dry in the spring, I planted it two and a half inches deep to get it in the moisture and it was out of the ground. We had heat, it the end of May, we had heat.

It was on the ground in five days. Would I do that on a cool year? By all means not.

Justin Brackenrich (32:18)
I mean, that's kind of interesting because like, is it? Five times the width of your seed or, know, there are these little like rule of thumb things and you're planting it, you know, corn depth, right? Of two inch, inch and a half, something like that with a significantly smaller seed. Okay. Cause so if I was talking to someone or if I was, you know, I would initially think like, ⁓ we're half inch type thing, right? We're looking at more like a four inch seed depth. So that's really good that you shared that.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (32:34)
Right.

So I'll put some caveats with that. My recommendation on seed depth is actually different from year to year. If we're a cool year, we will only plant one inch deep. Soil to seed contact is really, really, really, really, really critical. If we're going into sod stand, which I don't recommend, but make sure you're getting below that sod.

to get your soil to seed contacts at root zone. Don't expect that seed to grow if you're planting it in the sod root zone. It won't grow. You won't get good soil to seed contact. Soil to seed contact is really, really critical. I've actually found the best stands come from planting between an inch, an inch and a half. More or less like soybeans.

speaker-2 (33:30)
Okay.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (33:31)
And then, dry year, we dropped it down to two inches to put it into moisture. The critical thing is get it into moisture.

Justin Brackenrich (33:37)
So we've talked a lot about, think as we kind of wrap up this introductory, I think we'll title this one Sorghum 101, right? So as we kind of move to wrap up this idea, we've talked about varieties, we've learned the term milo, we've learned that there's a grain version and a forage version of sorghum. We've talked a little bit about some natural disease resistance, we've talked about equipment needs, the concern for drying.

⁓ understanding we're never going to wait out the moisture for harvest. So Dale, the last question I have and then we'll give it to Dwayne is does this crop make sense with all that we've talked about now somewhere to replace these droughty damaged deer problem areas in our operations?

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (34:22)
I still find it to be the most deer tolerant crop. Notice I said tolerant, not resistant. There is no crop that is resistant to deer, period. But it is the crop that is the most deer tolerant. Now, I've also figured out how you got out some more deer. That's the only way you can do it. There's a couple things that I've found that actually help it to be even more deer tolerant.

Narrows, I have a theory that a taller variety will help with that. So if a deer can't see through it, they won't tend to go through it. So get a taller variety planted. There's another thing that I, it's a key factor in that planting on the early side, typical temperature, ground temperature, they want 60 degrees and rising. I push the envelope on that. Just,

If the forecast looks like it's going to remain warm and relatively dry, I will plant. Because I want that crop to get mature in the fall and dry down quickly. Because it seems like the longer it gets in the fall, the less the deer have to eat outside of the fields. They move into your crops more. So my goal is to get that crop

Mature get it drying down so we can get it off the field quicker I used to say that it the deer basically will let it alone till it's below 20 percent I found that's not true They will eat it at they will eat it at 30 percent as well and that's why I want to get it from 30 to 20 really really quickly and Planting and seed varieties or day-length selection on that is really critical

Justin Brackenrich (36:02)
So I think that's something we maybe should have talked about more or I wish we had more time to get into day length because sorghum is set up similar to corn, right? It's a day length maturity of when you're purchasing that variety compared to something like soybeans that's a two, three or a two, five. What are you doing? Let's do that. I'd be sad if we didn't. Let's do it.

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (36:22)
Yeah

Yes,

but grain sorghum also one of the reasons it's very drought tolerant is it will quit adding heating degree days up when it so the plant totally shuts down. So you don't want to make sure you want to make sure you're selecting a variety that is a little bit shorter than your corn and they market it two different ways. Most of the most of the seed companies market days to mid-bloom. So that's confusing. I'll clarify one thing if you add 40 to it.

you come up to about the same as corn. That's a rule of thumb. So we plant, typically I'm saying a 60 to 65 day to mid bloom. So that's like a 100 to 105 day form. We have a shorter than that too, but that's, so that's a real quick rundown on that.

Justin Brackenrich (37:11)
No, that's excellent. Okay. Well, I think this has been great. Dwayne, any follow up or final questions for Dale?

Dale Stoltzfus/ Dwane Miller (37:17)
So my last question for you, Dale, all right, if I'm a farmer and I'm frustrated with the double days, the deer and the drought, and I'm thinking about this, would your recommendation for a new producer be, all right, maybe you want to try 10 acres or, hey, if you've got 50, 60 acres,

Let's have at it. What would you recommend? Start at small or make a switch? So small depends on the scale of the form.

To some people that will be 10 acres. One bag plants six to eight acres. So you might plant 10 acres. I tell people if you're gonna be small, maybe get it to 12 acres. Because then you're, you if you do 100 bushels, it's a truckload or it's a semi load. Yeah, I mean, it depends how you're hauling it. I look at that too. How are you gonna move it to market? I'm a 100 acre corn grower. How's that? So if you're 100 acre corn grower,

Yeah, I probably would go, yeah, maybe 20 acres. That's two truckloads. It's three bags of seed.

So that's a good way to look at it. Then I look, then I talk to the next guy that's doing a thousand acres, he might start with a hundred acres. So it's relative to scale.

Justin Brackenrich (38:33)
So call it 10 to 20 percent, Thinking of it that way, but I'm sure that that also plays into where your shipping would be going, your trucking price, all of the things that you have to back that up. Interesting. Okay. Well, thank you, Dale, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, we're going to follow up with Dale and we're going to do another episode, probably be coming out in a few weeks. And we're going to talk about...

little bit more of the specifics of what he's doing because he's working in a high-yielding sorghum now right not just this idea of Sorghum being an alternative or sorghum being a placeholder But he's looking at this is how can we be most successful for sorghum? So if this is something you enjoyed join us back in a couple weeks and we'll have day I want to get into talk about Markets some of the other things he's doing and in a more in-depth idea with sorghum. So Thanks everyone for joining

Have a great day.