Varieties of Forage Sorghum

Characteristics

• Forage sorghum looks like a corn plant, but the upright seedhead plume at the top is the valuable part. The seeds can be white, yellow, red or bronze. Forage sorghum grows 8 to 13 feet tall and is more coarse-stemmed than grain sorghum, so it produces more tonnage for silage.

Types

• Forage sorghums include sorgo, sweet sorghum, dual-purpose grain sorghums (milo), sudangrass and hybrids of these. Sudangrass (Sorghum bicolor subsp. drummondii) grows 4 to 7 feet tall and has smaller stems, so it dries faster for storage. Forage sorghum produces about the same amount of silage per acre as corn.

Varieties

• In the early 2000s, Texas A&M University conducted sorghum trials to compare varieties. Top varieties that were in the trial for the longest time, six years, had their silage and grain yields averaged over that time. Top producers for silage were Maxi Gain Coffey Seed Sorghum, which yielded 30.1 tons per acre, and 4-Ever Green Walter Moss Seed Forage Sorghum, at 29.8 tons, but these two varieties were not rated for grain yield. The varieties yielding the most grain were P84G62 Pioneer Hi-Bred International Grain Sorghum, which yielded 7,235 lbs. per acre and 18.3 tons of silage, and A571 Monsanto Grain Sorghum, which yielded 7,288 lbs. of grain per acre and 19.9 tons of silage.

Nutrition

• The sorghum trials also rated varieties on the percentage of crude protein they yielded. The highest in protein were 979 Pioneer Hi-Bred International Sorghum/Sudan at 8.5 percent, followed by A571 Monsanto Grain Sorghum and Canex BMR 208 Sharp Brothers Seed Forage Sorghum, both at 8.3 percent. Sorghum is comparable to corn in feed value, containing slightly higher protein, calcium and phosphorus levels and a substantially higher level of potassium than corn silage. It contains less grain and more fiber than corn.