Developing sweet sorghum varieties for biorefinery applications

Sweet sorghum is fast-growing, high-biomass crop that can accumulate sugars in the stalk or convert those sugars into grain. Moreover, water requirements for sweet sorghum are relatively low and it can be grown on marginal land. These attributes make sweet sorghum an ideal crop to produce feedstocks for conversion into food, feed, fibre, and fuel products in a biorefinery.

Wild and improved sweet sorghum varieties have a wide range of phenotypes (e.g., height, sugar content, biomass yield), so there is ample opportunity to develop sweet sorghum varieties for specific growing environments and industrial applications.

The Project will assess the agronomic performance of 31 sweet sorghum varieties grown in South-East Queensland and identify which varieties are best suited to specific biorefinery applications. The high-yield sweet sorghum varieties were developed by Earthnote Japan based upon on almost a decade of research and development.