Super Sugar Sorghum Sudan: Budget-Friendly Biomass and Grazing Cover Crop

0:00 This is a super sugar product and we have this in several different flavors. If you will, super sugar is just straight sorghum sedan cross. It does not have the brown midrib trait which makes it less expensive but it also makes it not quite.

0:13 As good for grazing but if you're on a pretty tight budget it can work really well and if you're looking to produce a lot of biomass in a short period of time this is one of your go-to hybrids.

0:23 Sorghum sudans grow very quickly but

0:26 They also regrow very quickly. You can see right here this would have been mowed off probably about a month ago and so we've gotten in the last several weeks here quite a bit of regrowth, very lush regrowth, and so from.

0:40 A grazing standpoint or if you're paying, it you get a lot of regrowth. Now this super regular super sugar is like, say it doesn't have any additional traits but it comes in several other varieties ideal once you go ahead and talk about.

0:54 The male sterile product — a lot of people ask why would you have something that does not produce grain, why would you have something that's sterile? This product, the advantage of male sterility is it's a quality play when a sorghum

1:12 Produces a seed head as you can see here. A lot of the starch that's produced as a product of photosynthesis gets locked inside these hard-coded indigestible berries. These are relatively unavailable to grazing livestock unless the seed

1:32 Coat is cracked. If this is a sterile product, that sugar that's produced by photosynthesis has nowhere to go, and so it stays in the stem where it makes the stem more palatable and more digestible instead of ending up getting.

2:06 Been bred to be a very long season. Sorghum Sedan, so it's not photoperiod sensitive like the sweet forever is because it is starting to put a few heads on, but it is about 15 to 20 days longer maturity. So if you're planting

2:20 These things early in the summer we definitely would like to see you use either delayed maturity or a sterile product if you're planning it later in the year. You probably don't need that and you can just go with the.

2:33 Regular one and save yourself a little bit of money, but definitely the delayed maturity product is much later maturing. It can still put on seed heads, especially as you move south here in Nebraska, you know this here being in the.

2:46 Middle of September is not going to produce any seed and this was planted the third week in June. But as you move south, there has that potential delayed maturity. The longer the maturity on the product, the higher the yield you're going to get. So if you're looking for biomass, this is going to be a really nice play. And if you want after grazing livestock, something with a brown midrib is going to provide superior nutrition. But the residue from this is going to persist longer than a BMR once it hits the soil. So if building residue is your goal, this could be a very good choice.