Dwarf 110 Sorghum for Silage and Winter Grazing

0:00 Sometimes looks can be deceiving, Dale. This sorghum is quite a bit shorter than all the other ones around us, but it packs a lot down in this canopy. This is our dwarf 110, our dwarf sorghum 110 we call it. It's a brown mid-rib. You can see how brown that mid-rib is in there, which is an

0:19 Indication that it's got the low lignin gene makes it really palatable for livestock and the animals. But just because this is short doesn't mean it's not productive and isn't going to tone out. Tell us a little bit about the bracketic dwarf gene that's bred into this particular plant and some other ones that we have.

0:38 And how that makes it different and more valuable in certain situations than some of these others.

0:46 So basically what I'm going to do here, let's just take a look at these two products. You know this is half the height of this.

0:56 Taller forage sorghum here but let's count leaves. I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and still coming. I've got eight here. Yeah, so I've got more leaves and more to come before the head pops out and this is already headed. Let's take a look at the leaf width.

1:15 Yeah, it's a little better.

1:18 Leaf length better and let's look at the yield on this stock diameter. Stock diameter is bigger and now if you're looking for a hay product, stock diameter is bad, but in a

1:35 Silage product. This is not a hard rind. This is actually very soft. I mean I can whack right through that. You can't do that on a corn stalk, for example, not with this little pocket knife. But you can also see that the brown from

1:57 The income, the lignin that's not being fully formed, so this is a very highly digestible stock and animals will actually eat this stock very well in a free grazing situation. So this is a great silage product as long as it gets some grain development before frost.

2:35 This is a forage sorghum. We got some dwarf sorghum sedans that would be better, have the same characteristics you talked about, but for a grazing situation, right, for a summer grazing situation. But one place I really do like this is in a winter grazing situation. This is one of my very favorite products.

2:56 Double cropped after wheat where it's not going to produce grain it's going to end up looking like this at frost just nothing but a pack of leaves.

3:06 If you look at it these leaves wrap almost completely around this stalk. You see here this leaf is wrapped.

3:17 Completely around that stalk now. You compare that to a sorghum sedan like here. That leaf attachment is just very narrow right there at the base. Now let me get a piper. See it, that's less than halfway around you have.

3:45 A very narrow leaf attachment, so when the wind picks up these are blowing off right, and that's what we've seen when we try to stockpile sorghum sedans. The leaves just shred off, but on the forage sorghums and this product in particular, the leaves hang on.

4:02 Having the short stature also helps stand ability in the winter. For a winter stockpile mix right now amongst all our offerings, this is my number one. But I also like to put something tall in there to break the wind and keep it off of this. So you can plant this in June or July, graze it in December and January, and it's still standing really well.