Demand Growing For Sorghum Products

Demand Growing For Sorghum Products 33-5-11 Richard Wittgreve produces more than 1,300 gal. of sorghum syrup for sale each year. His Rolling Meadows Sorghum Mill is one of a handful of large, mechanized sorghum operations in the country. Thanks to a growing health food market, the Wisconsin farmer is also selling coarse ground sorghum for hot cereal, sorghum flour, and even sorghum-caramelized popcorn. He got started in the business because he missed an old favorite treat - sorghum syrup. "I started raising sorghum in 1985 because I couldn't find any sorghum syrup," he recalls. "I raised a third of an acre and cooked up 6 gal. the first year. The next year we did 12 gal. and then 25 and then 50. I cooked it all down in two pans set over a fire between four cement blocks." By 1990, Wittgreve had started selling his syrup and was planting three acres of the crop. When he lost two of the acres, he realized that he had been making more income on those 2 acres than he would have made on 100 acres of conventional crops. He decided to get serious about sorghum. "I started building equipment and a processing facility," he says. "It took nearly 8 years to get fully mechanized." Wittgreve explains that most sorghum syrup producers (as opposed to grain or forage sorghum producers) keep small plots and cut the harvest by hand. The pieces are then fed by hand through a roller to extract the juice, which is then boiled down to syrup in batches in pans over a fire. Wittgreve uses large equipment, including a modified Hagie Highboy Sprayer. A front tool bar carries 6 rotary blades for trimming seed heads off 6 rows at a time, about two weeks prior to harvest. Heads are trimmed so the seed won't end up in the syrup and so the stalks don't' lodge. He makes a second trip through the field a week before harvest to get any partial seed heads that remain. Wittgreve uses a two-row, modified stalk chopper to harvest stalks, which are cut into 6 to 9-in. chunks and blown into a forage wagon. Chunks are run through a three-roller press at a rate that extracts 300 gal. of juice per hour. At that point, the clock starts to tick. "You have to process the juice within 24 hours, or it will start to ferment," he says. "The juice is preheated in large bulk tanks with high pressure steam coils. We pull off the scum that floats to the top which leaves a brown tea-like juice." Sediment falls to the bottom to be removed, while the juice is cooked down in large pans with steam coils in them for heating. Each day Wittgreve cooks down 1,100 gal. of juice into 125 gal. of syrup, which is stored in 55-gal. drums and eventually bottled and sold. Wittgreve also raises his own popcorn, caramelizing it with sorghum and shipping it all over the U.S. This year he added sorghum flour made from white sorghum, a special type of grain sorghum grown in western Kansas by contract growers. "About three years ago we started getting requests for sorghum flour," he says. "We didn't realize how much demand there is for gluten-free flour. " Wittgreve expects the sorghum market to continue to expand as more people discover its health benefits. He points out that a third of a cup of sorghum syrup has 8,540 units of antioxidants and a quarter cup of sorghum flour has 9,378. This compares to 2,400 in 3 1/2 oz. of blueberries. As a result, even people who aren't allergic to gluten are buying the flour and cereal. That's not to say this is a get rich quick business. "There is no commodity market for sorghum syrup," he says. "We spent 25 years finding stores that would buy a few cases a year. Our market runs 300 miles in each direction, and we travel 50,000 miles a year to stores and shows to sell our products. Sorghum's been good to us, and we've learned a lot." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Rolling Meadows Sorghum Mill, N9030 Little Elkhart Lake Road, Elkhart Lake, Wis. 53020 (ph 920 876-2182, sorghum@excel.net).

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