The Art of Growing Sorghum

Alan Ware
Alan Ware

Each year in June Alan Ware and other Kerr Center staffers plant three acres of “Dale” and “Topper” varieties of sweet sorghum. The Kerr Center has been growing sorghum for over ten years; it grows well in the area, and was a common crop in pre-World War II Oklahoma.

The week before Farm-fest, the annual harvest festival at the Overstreet-Kerr Historical Farm, they harvest it.

The challenge the Kerr Center faces each year is having the sorghum reach the right stage of maturity at the time of Fall Farm-Fest, which is always the second Friday and Saturday of October. (Friday is reserved just for school groups.)

The Kerr Center grows three irrigated acres, but growing the cane is just the first challenge. Then comes the processing. During Farm Fest, the cane is pressed in a 1900 Chattanooga mill, powered by mules. The extracted juice is then poured into a continuous flow copper “sorghum pan” and boiled down over a wood fire outside until it thickens into dark brown syrup. (The center also extracts juice in advance with a modern power press).
Before cooking the juice, Ware measures its sugar percentage using an optical instrument called a refractometer. The ideal range is 18-22 percent. After cooking, the syrup is about 80 per cent sugar.

Each year a team of volunteer cookers tends the juice as it passes through the five chambers of the pan. Eighty-year-old Delmar Robinson, who has been cooking sorghum since he was a kid, is the man at the far end of the pan. Every few minutes he tests the thickness of the syrup with the stick he keeps close at hand, and judges when the sorghum is ready to pour out. The syrup finishes cooking for about ten minutes in the last chamber.

Although conditions are rarely perfect – in 2003 the sugar content of the juice fell a bit short of ideal and the weather was a bit too cool and cloudy the days of the fest (best is sunny and dry), they always do, in the end, get a very good tasting syrup. Says Ware: “That’s why it’s the art, not the science of making sorghum.

The Kerr Center offers a manual, Sweet Sorghum: Production and Processing, which describes a small scale, commercial operation. Click here to purchase online.