Advancing the Productivity Frontier for Sorghum

The most drought resistant among the five most important cereal crops, and a key dual-use (grain and biomass) crop in regions containing some of the world’s most degraded soils, sorghum has inherent climate resilience that is likely to become more important under environmental conditions that are projected by many climate change models. The importance of sorghum might be further elevated by the development of productive genotypes that increase the extent and duration of soil cover beyond those of conventional annual crops, mitigating or even reversing losses of ecological capital through multiple crops from single plantings. The ‘Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Climate Resilient Sorghum’ seeks to improve upon the drought resilience of sorghum, and also to develop genotypes suitable for multiple cropping cycles via ratooning and/or perenniality, as two elements of a future agroecosystem that must produce more with less water, while mitigating or preferably reversing losses of ecological capital such as topsoil.