Download - icrisat

33
And from there? From green to white, which signifies harvest turning into white as source of heat – ethyl alcohol.
This is ethanol ignited to run engines that run transport vehicles, with the result that the air is cleaner than when
we started, with the end result that cars and trucks do not contribute to global warming. For it is true that the green
crops harvest the bad breath of Earth (carbon dioxide in the air) and turn it into organic matter; and the best of
such crops yield the 5 Fs of the organic world: food, feed, forage, fuel, fertilizer.
And that crop is? I discovered it to be sweet sorghum. And I discovered it to be one of the mandate crops of
ICRISAT. Does ICRISAT realize the treasure that it has in this crop? She does. That explains the ICRISAT-Rusni Distillery
humdinger of an agreed enterprise supported by the Government
of Andhra Pradesh, where small sweet sorghum farmers supply the
feedstock to the plant in a commercial-scale arrangement.
One of the best 5 Fs crops I’ve come to know is sweet sorghum,
known in scientific circles as Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench. This
complete name originates from Germany; the original taxonomic
nomenclature was assigned by the ‘(L.)’ – the Father of Taxonomy
himself, Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus (also abbreviated Linn.);
the nomenclature has been revised by and so is attributed to
‘Moench’ – the German botanist Conrad Moench. While the US is
giving the world the impression that it is unchanged by climate
change, or there is no climate change at all, science stands corrected.
For all its rotten reputation, sweet sorghum, to distinguish it from
grain sorghum, is sweet and juicy. It is a wonderful crop in fact.
Let me compare it to corn, the energy crop of choice of the poor
Yankees.
When in drought, sweet
sorghum remains dormant;
with the coming of rain, it
resumes growth and recovers,
unlike corn. The FAO refers
to it as ‘a camel among crops’
because it can survive where
the soil is too dry as well as
when the soil is too wet.
From Yankee LC Anderson of Iowa State University (August 2000, energy.iastate.edu), I learn that:
(1) The stalks of sweet sorghum can yield 1,235 gallons of ethanol to a hectare, 2 times that of corn. Great
provider.
From what I gather from Yankee Syngenta (2003, syngentafoundation.org), I think this is a thinking plant if ever I
heard of one:
(2) When in drought, sweet sorghum remains dormant; with the coming of rain, it resumes growth and recovers,
unlike corn. The FAO refers to it as ‘a camel among crops’ because it can survive where the soil is too dry as
well as when the soil is too wet (Agronomy21, 2002, fao.org). Intelligent being.
(3) Again, unlike corn, sorghum’s aboveground parts wait for the root system to be well established before they
grow any further. Intelligent system.
The Yankee Dawdle