Are Americans Getting Sweet on Sorghum?

One contender is sorghum, a drought-tolerant, heat-resistant “ancient grain,” whose earliest known use dates to 8,000 BCE in northeastern Africa. High in nutrients like magnesium, selenium, zinc, iron and vitamin B6, sorghum is part of a diverse group of small-grained cereals called millets that are a staple diet among the world’s most food-insecure communities. To honor the role millets play globally, and to help expand their market, the United Nations declared 2023 the International Year of the Millet.

The United States is the largest sorghum producer in the world. In 2025, American farmers harvested a projected 428 million bushels, with Kansas the leading producer. So why has the grain not received the same attention as other major grains in the United States?

Sorghum production has long been concentrated in what some call the “Sorghum Belt,” stretching from South Dakota to Texas and from Colorado to Georgia. With the industrialization of U.S. agriculture in the mid-20th century, sorghum was outpaced by sugarcane and corn—crops that benefited from massive federal investment and the rapid build-out of processing infrastructure. As corn became central to ethanol production and sugarcane to industrial sweeteners, sorghum remained largely sidelined, leaving little incentive to develop the specialized facilities needed to process its thick stalks into a molasses-like syrup at scale.

Today, only a handful of processors in the country press sorghum into juice and then syrup. The product has nearly disappeared from American grocery shelves.

“Sorghum syrup died because it couldn’t keep up with refined sugar—it never got a mechanized process, it was always done by hand,” says Carl Batt, owner of Empire Syrups, New York State’s only farmstead producer of sorghum syrup.

Most of the grain grown today is exported to Mexico and China for animal feed. But with both maple syrup and sugarcane production on the decline, a handful of farmers are testing whether sorghum grain and syrup production could become a more significant part of Northeast harvests.

Today, sorghum is considered not just as a novelty ingredient, but also part of a plan to build long-term resilience for regional farmers.

“There’s a dwindling number of sugar producers in the U.S.,” Batt says. “Texas is now too hot to produce sugarcane.”

But it’s not just the heat that causes harm, it’s that combined with the limited water supply that puts the crop in real danger.

Empire Syrups, which grows sweet sorghum on a farm in Groton, New York, sells to regional restaurants and bakeries including Stone Barns at Blue Hill in Tarrytown, New York, and Brooklyn Granary & Mill, where owner and baker Patrick Shaw-Kitch incorporates the syrup into his baked goods, along with grains milled on-site. Shaw-Kitch, the head baker at Blue Hill from 2019 to 2023, left to build his own grain mill in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood, which opened in April 2025. It is the only milling operation in New York City.

His interest in sorghum syrup is rooted in its connection to place as a regional sweetener.

In the bakeries back-of-house, quarts of Empire Syrups’ sorghum syrup sit stacked upon each other to incorporate into its baked goods in place of other sweeteners. Shaw-Kitch describes sorghum syrup’s flavor as somewhere between molasses and maple, but with more complexity. The texture most closely resembles molasses, but the flavor is sweeter, and much richer than maple.

“It’s a super distinct flavor,” he says. “You can’t really shy away from it, which is a blessing and a curse as a baker.”

He’s had to pivot from certain recipes like granola for which sorghum’s flavor is too intense, but in deeper flavored desserts like buckwheat ginger cakes, it’s a perfect fit. He also uses it in a sorghum bread that uses both the flour and the syrup.

The biggest constraint for farmers eyeing sorghum syrup as a new revenue stream is infrastructure. Few machines exist globally that can field-press sorghum at a commercial scale. Batt at Empire Syrups says that many of the people who built those machines never produced formal blueprints, making it tough to replicate their models.

“There are only maybe seven machines in the world that go out and field-press syrup,” he says. “And they were all built by individuals, they’re all different. We probably built the most straightforward machine around.”

Because sugarcane received government backing, its processing infrastructure became standardized and scaled. While sugarcane and sorghum are similar, sorghum’s thinner, more fibrous stalks and chemically complex juice require a specialized press that cannot be shared with sugarcane equipment.

Batt built his machine from the parts of an old, defunct piece of corn processing equipment. While costly, the repaired machine gave his farm a chance to produce syrup with a positive financial return, which could likely be recouped over 7-10 years of syrup production. Building a machine from scratch, he estimates, would likely cost upwards of $300,000, an investment that could take generations of sorghum syrup production to recoup.

To make sorghum syrup, the crop is harvested before seed heads fully dry. The grains are then stripped from the stalks and the canes are pressed for juice, which is then clarified and slowly cooked down into a thick, molasses-like syrup. The grain and cane are processed separately: the stalks are used for syrup, while the seeds can be saved for animal feed or replanting.

Empire Syrups is beginning a series of sorghum grain field trials this year—with the hopes of establishing whether the growing season is long and dry enough for the crop to succeed, in which case they would also be able to take flour to market.

Batt and fellow New York City-based sorghum enthusiast Brooke Singer are now the only producers in the Northeast attempting to build a commercial sorghum industry from scratch.

“We’ve spent the last couple of years building machines to overcome labor issues. We’re the only commercial syrup producers in the Northeast. It’s a lot of mass to collect, several tons of stalk at a time,” Batt says. “We built a machine that cuts and presses it in the field, so all we’re taking back is juice.”

Singer, Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, and founder of Carbon Sponge—a collective research practice that partners with farmers, artists, scientists and agroecologists—sees sorghum as a gateway crop for land stewards. “Carbon Sponge brings in farmers who have fallow land and grow sorghum for the first time. It’s a great pioneer crop with very low requirements,” she says. “We’ve worked with about a dozen farms since 2021.”

The initiative began with urban farms across New York City and then spread upstate to work with farmers in the Hudson Valley and Catskills regions.

Carbon Sponge also points to sorghum as a means to help regenerate soil and sequester carbon from the atmosphere, making it valuable to farmers who may never press it into syrup at all.

Compared to field corn, which has been heavily engineered by big seed companies like Monsanto and requires large amounts of nitrogen fertilizers and other inputs, sorghum’s genetic diversity makes it more adaptable as temperatures continue to rise and requires less inputs from fertilizers and irrigation.

Places like Stone Barns are experimenting with food-grade sorghum as part of a more ecologically grounded grain system. The agricultural center grew sorghum as a cover crop for 20 years, when they began the shift into grain production. They’ve also converted the crop into sugar, and nixtamalizing red sorghum to use in traditionally corn-based dishes like arepas and tamales.

While independent producers like Stone Barns and Empire Syrups are coming up with innovative solutions, they are still in the minority. Less than two percent of U.S. sorghum is grown for human consumption, and industry groups like the Sorghum Checkoff and National Sorghum Producers increasingly promote high-yield hybrids and large-scale production models that mirror the same agribusiness systems that sorghum is often cast as a corrective to.

Beyond labor and machinery, reviving sorghum syrup also requires building new markets. “Most of the regular producers make it for the clientele that grew up with it, and they wonder why the market is drying up,” Batt says, referring to growers in the South and Midwest who have produced syrup for generations. “Bigger producers sell it to bakers, distillers, etc. But it’s not the equivalent of sugar. And it’s difficult to sell something on a long-term sustainable or social-good basis.”

Brooklyn Granary hopes to expand public exposure to sorghum, and to regional grains more broadly, a grain economy that sorghum production is tightly woven into.

“NYC is probably not where it should be with a regional grain system,” Shaw-Kitch says. “If there were a strong movement toward regional grains grown on regenerative farms, there would be more demand.”

Miranda LiptonMore by this author →

Miranda is a food journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a 2025 fellow in the John’s Hopkins Food Systems and Public Health Journalism program, and her work can be found in Mother Jones, The Guardian, National Geographic and more.