It’s as old as ancient Egypt, as modern as gluten-free diets. It will never be as pretty as corn, but pheasants on the Great Plains love it for habitat. And in an age of climate change, it’s the grain that endures through drought and heat.
Welcome to the world of sorghum: the red-headed stepchild at the end of the farm bill table — all grown up and well, almost cool.
Indeed, grain sorghum — or milo to many — is surprisingly au courant these days with its water sipping, non-gluten, anti-GMO credentials. But it knows its place: no rocking the boat or being too preachy. And with Congress slated to vote next month on a long-delayed farm bill, sorghum’s a window into the survival politics of small crops trying to hold on amid the dominance of corn.
In recent years, the combined plantings of corn and its frequent partner, soybeans, have run 28 percent over their historic base. More striking, perhaps, is their share of all cash receipts for plant crops grown in the United States.
Prices are now falling, but corn and beans alone accounted for nearly half of all the receipts in 2012. That means just two giant players roughly matched the dollars generated by all other program crops plus the revenue-rich fruit and vegetable market.
It’s no wonder that the corn-and-beans lobby has been so powerful in shaping the new commodity title to be unveiled in January. But it’s a level of concentration that affects the diversity of American agriculture and the land itself.
After cotton, rice and wheat are factored into the equation, the results are only more lopsided. Just 7 percent of the program acres and 4 percent of receipts are left for the likes of sorghum, barley, oats, sunflower seed, dry peas, lentils, canola and peanuts — each trying to hold on to its slim margins.
The peanut is enough of a favorite cash crop to command its own set of powerful protectors in the South. But for many of the others, it’s a little like being some small military unit from Mongolia or Romania, looking for a buddy in President George W. Bush’s famous “coalition of the willing” in Iraq.
“We compete against corn and soybeans in the North. We compete against cotton in the South,” says Tim Lust, CEO for the National Sorghum Producers in Lubbock, Texas. “It’s an industry, and if you lose too many acres, you lose the capital investment that goes with that.”
In fact, corn’s relentless expansion has eaten into sorghum’s old base of 11.6 million acres. New markets in China and the growing sales of gluten-free products at home are generating a bounce back. And to help this progress, target prices set in the House farm bill give sorghum a 25-cents-per-bushel differential over corn.
But with cotton transitioning out of the commodity title and into a new revenue insurance program, sorghum worries about its future as a rotation crop in the South. And to hear growers tell it, the very scrappy nature of the plant works against it in terms of generating good yield numbers for its own crop insurance protection.
Precious water resources like the Ogallala aquifer beneath the Great Plains would almost certainly be better protected with more sorghum and less irrigated corn. But those environmental concerns don’t add points for the bookkeepers at the Risk Management Agency which oversees the federally subsidized crop insurance program.
“We pay a price for being a tough guy,” Lust says.
Powered by new seeds and climate change, corn’s expansion is also affecting small-acreage crops well to the north of sorghum country.
Few states rival North Dakota’s historic diversity of plantings — from flaxseed and lentils to barley, oats and a growing emphasis today on once-tiny canola. But in 1994, corn and beans accounted for only 11 percent of North Dakota’s planted acres. In 2012, the total was closer to 39 percent.
Wheat and barley were the big losers, but keeping watch in Washington is Dale Thorenson, a likable farmer-turned-lobbyist whose family still farms several thousand acres in Bottineau County along the Canadian border.
In a recent year, that operation included plantings of seven crops: corn, soybeans, oats, spring wheat, malting barley, canola and sunflowers. At 57, Thorenson is a big believer in protecting this sort of mix — not just for the small markets but also the farmers themselves.
“I think the diversity spreads out your risk, especially as everybody’s gotten bigger to stay in it,” he says. “You spread out your harvests. You don’t have everything operating at one time.”
Looking back at his own 25 years farming, he adds: “It’s not easy. It appears to be easy, but it isn’t that easy to beat Mother Nature. That’s what it amounts to: You have one chance each year to steal a crop from the elements.”
Thorenson is part of Gordley Associates, whose principal, John Gordley, is a former Senate Agriculture Committee aide and powerhouse now for the soybeans lobby. In the same fashion, sorghum has signed up with what many see as Gordley’s chief rival in this farm bill: Combest, Sell & Associates, founded by former House Agriculture Committee Chairman Larry Combest (R-Texas) and one-time committee aide Tom Sell, who shares the same West Texas roots as his old boss.
It’s a symbiotic relationship, almost: the small-guy crops looking for protection but also broadening the coalition for the big players.
Together with the National Corn Growers Association, for example, Gordley has been most aggressive in pounding on House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) over the shape of the commodity programs. But it doesn’t hurt to have Thorenson organizing a gentler chorus of support from smaller-acreage clients.
The pattern repeats itself in the case of Sell. He is counted as a close ally of Lucas as well as Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the ranking Democrat on the House panel. Rice, sugar, cotton and dairy producers — all priorities of Lucas or Peterson — are among Combest, Sell & Associates clients. Having sorghum as a client adds a little more spice — and reach — to this mix.
A third, very different power center is built around the hundreds of small, often wildly diverse “specialty crops” — the nomenclature assigned to fruits, vegetables, nuts, nursery stock.
These occupy what amounts to their own parallel universe alongside the traditional commodity program crops at the heart of the farm bill. But with the rise of the organic movement and greater emphasis on locally grown produce, specialty crops are an important political asset in competing for votes in a House with fewer and fewer rural districts.
Each camp still looks down its nose at the other. Consider the ridicule heaped on presidential candidate Michael Dukakis when the Massachusetts Democrat suggested that Iowa corn farmers try growing Belgian endive — given low corn prices in the late 1980s.
Twenty-five years later, the snobberies cut the other way. A young Senate Agriculture aide sighs impatiently: Sorghum is “boring,” he says, advising this reporter to help his career and readership with a piece that focused instead on mint growers or Japanese eggplant.
“We’re special,” jokes Robert Guenther, senior vice president for policy with the United Fresh Produce Association. And with so much diversity in his membership, Guenther says the farm bill can never be a single commodity program but more a “tool box” from which producers can find what best suits their needs.
“You have to look at it from the standpoint: What are the tools that help the grower be competitive in their marketplace?” Guenther says. Research investments, money to fight pests and diseases are part of this. But there is also a greater interest in new forms of crop insurance.
Orchards and vineyards may be happy with traditional insurance against cold snaps and hailstorms, for example.
“When you look at trees and vines that are in the ground for 10, 15, 25 years, crop insurance has worked pretty well,” Guenther says. “When you look at crops like melons and leafy greens and tomatoes, there’s still work to be done.”
For example, risk management for these crops here may be less about weather and more about instances when a food safety crisis or quarantine ruins markets for innocent growers. “They’re losing revenue and had nothing to do with the outbreak,” Guenther says. “We’re looking for ways … to address those types of issues that are more in line with current risk management challenges our industry faces.”
Nothing has helped him more, perhaps, than having the Senate Agriculture Committee chaired by someone from a state like Michigan, famous for its specialty crops. The House has joined in, but Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) set the tone early in the farm bill debate, and amid all the cuts from existing commodity programs, specialty crops are almost certain to emerge stronger.
“They say we’ll be happy,” Guenther says. “Stabenow has been a champion for specialty crops, fruits and vegetables since she has been in Congress. She has been a strong proponent of our issues.”
But does he ever think that there could be a diversity alliance — coupling smaller-acreage program crops with his own specialty crop constituency?
“We’ve talked in the past, but not necessarily in a strategic type of discussion,” Guenther says. “If there is another farm bill after this one, certainly we ought to consider it.”
Source: Small-acre crops and the farm bill – David Rogers – POLITICO.com.