03/09/11, 07:56 PM
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Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 7,692
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Okie-Dokie
Thanks for the telephone number Farmboybill! Finally got thru to them. They indeed do have Kaffer corn seed for sale. They call it white popping sorgum now days but I am sure it is the same stuff we used to grow in Western Oklahoma when I was a child growing up with my grandparents. We used to drill it just like cotton only with different seed plates in the planter. Great stuff for poor folks. We fed the seed heads to the chickens and pigs and then cut the stalks for the cattle. My grandmother would also grind the seed for flour and save a little bit to pop like popcorn as a treat for us come nightfall and when the snow was too deep for the school bus. The cattle and pigs ate the stalks real good even though it was dried up in the fall. It grew really well in those hot, dry, windy summers. Prices of corn & wheat are so high it would work good instead of the feed we traditionally buy at the Feed Store. Thanks, again!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Callieslamb
It seemed to me that the posting above mine only described all corn - except for the popping part. So no ear and kernals like field corn? what kind of flour do the seeds make? I remember my dad cutting us pieces of sugar cane out of his fields.
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Notice where I highlighted line in Okie's post: "They call it white popping sorgum now days"
There is a variety of sorghum that produces seed that pops like popcorn only it really just puffs up a bit, far less than popcorn.
Sorghum is not sugar cane. I know people get all mixed up with terms sorghum and molasses and tend to use the terms interchangably. Sorghum is the liquid squeezed from the sorghum plant stalk (special varieties of sorghum grown to make sorghum syrup) and boiled down into a syrup much like maple syrup would be from maple tree sap. Molasses is the leftovers after sugar is extracted from sugar cane juice. Sugar cane is a tropical plant. Sorghum is not and can grow as far north as Minnesota and Wisconsin, though usually not grown that far north. It can grow anywhere field corn can mature and can be dry farmed where modern varieties of corn couldnt be farmed without irrigation. I remember as a kid in Iowa, Mom and Dad taking containers to buy sorghum from guy that raised it and had a sorghum press.
If you just must do it, think of sorghum grain as milo, if term sorghum is too confusing for you. Thats what commercial sorghum grain crops are called in this country. Though modern milo varieties raised as livestock feed is not the same varieties of traditional sorghum grains raised for human consumption. Milo varieties grown commercially are much more dwarf and I doubt you would find the seed tasty. It has become an industrial commodity looking for highest production and cheapest price just like modern field corn.
Anyway a sorghum plant looks almost identical to a corn plant as it grows. Corn developes ears, milo developes seed heads where you would expect the tassle to be on corn.
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Last edited by HermitJohn; 03/09/11 at 08:16 PM.
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