Sorghum: A Tale of Two Farmers
These men never met each other -- Heinz and Tony -- but they lived and farmed on the same piece of ground in Newburg, had the same next door neighbors, each had a hard-working and complicit wife, they all raised barefoot farm children and those men had the same dream of making sorghum molasses. They are separated by time but linked in so many ways. It seems to me that sorghum epitomizes what they have in common -- that and child labor. And yet, these two men could not possibly be more different from each other.
Our dad Tony learned about farming by traveling around and visiting other farms, mostly in the South but all across the country. Our winter trips always had a farm visiting component -- we would be driving through Louisiana on the way to California and Hawaii and the four of us kids would be lounging around in the back of the bus and we would groan with anticipated boredom when we turned into a driveway of some farm with equipment strewn all around a ramshackle barn. Oh, Dad, why do we have to stop? But he always had a project he was thinking about and he needed to find out how to do it, and in those days there were no sustainable agriculture conferences. There were just farms and farmers, and we had to drive to those farms and hang around while our father introduced himself to men with incomprehensible Southern accents.Most people think that a Southern accent is slow -- not really. It's more like the mouth is full of marbles and there are efficient ways to talk around those marbles, but the words are nearly impossible to understand. Our dad was kind of a shy guy but he would ask any farmer anything and those guys could stand and talk with their arms folded, leaning on a pickup truck for hours.
Back in those days, the early 1970s, he was interested in self-sufficiency. We had a milk cow and draft horses and beef cattle and we grew the food for those animals and we had a vegetable business and all that was missing was a sweetener. I don't know why honey never really grabbed his imagination. Not enough opportunity for mechanization, I bet. And way too solitary.
Sorghum is a grass like corn, gets about ten or twelve feet tall with a red clump of seeds at the top. Dad wasn't interested in the seeds (which can be ground up for flour), he was focused on the juice. Making sorghum molasses means squeezing the juice out of the cane, capturing it, boiling it until the water evaporates. Deceptively simple. Really a lot of trouble.
I don't think he ever thought of sorghum as a commercial venture, so the work was always done by friends and family. There may have been workers present but I doubt anyone was getting paid. On a hot and sticky weekend afternoon, we would go out to the patch with sticks and we would strip the leaves off the sorghum plants. Then an adult with a machete would cut down the sorghum and behead it, leaving the canes and the seed heads on the ground. Children and adults would gather up these unwieldy, long and very heavy stalks and load them onto a truck or trailer. Already we could smell the sugar.
The sorghum mill was in the front field that we didn't own but we used for many years (where there is now a subdivision with the tellingly boring name of Middleton). For the first years the mill was powered by a long pole that a horse or a human would push, by walking around and around in a tethered circle. This was super slow and pretty soon there was an upgrade. Eventually it was powered by a small tractor with a long, wide belt that connected the tractor to the mill. Definitely dangerous in every possible way. I can't remember exactly how that power was converted to turning the heavy cast iron cylinders that squished the canes, but Lani or Charles would be able to tell us. Our job was to feed the sorghum into that little space between the rollers, steadily, without pause. The canes would get sucked in and green juice would spray and trickle out, getting caught in a bucket. The juice was a brilliant green, like no other green.
Eventually we would have enough green juice to put into the big sorghum pan in the front yard, on top of a fire. The sorghum boiled fast until it started to get thick and then we had to slow down the fire and start stirring. Into the night, there was an eerie cloud of steam over a low fire. I remember my mother standing there stirring and stirring in the dark. I also remember the many batches that got burned by mistake. It's hard at the end, to stop the process at the right moment. You are working with a giant vat of boiling liquid over an open fire, trying not to make candy. I think we were generally asleep by the time they got the syrup off. I don't ever remember seeing that part.
For years there were gallon jugs filled with brown syrup in our basement, the metal lids rusting themselves onto the neck of the bottle. We ate a lot of sorghum in my teen years.
Fast forward about 45 years and we get to Heinz and his army of three teenage daughters and their amazing mom. For Heinz it's not just about self-sufficiency, it's about staying ahead of climate change and market forces. Already it is too hot to grow many of the vegetables we all depend on. Sorghum can take the heat. No one else is growing sorghum in our area (for many obvious reasons that I have already described). But Heinz is all about efficiency. He would never imagine cutting cane, picking it up, moving it. He bought a machine that cuts and presses right in the field. And he bought a pan that is designed to cook the syrup in an organized fashion, moving slowly around in a circle and ending up at an exit pipe, ready for bottling.
When I heard that he was just about ready to try his system, I said I want to see this. Make sure to call me. A few days ago, he was satisfied that the machine (a Rube Goldberg contraption from the mid 20th century) was greased and ready and he had thought of everything. Jon and I went down to watch. And damned it if didn't all work. We still had to strip the leaves off with a stick because there were aphids (bug juice, ugh) and that was memorably sweaty work, but the big machine actually cut the cane, fed it through the press and caught the juice. Pretty incredible. The juice was the wrong color, I think, because the cane was too old and dry (a very hot and dry summer) and the quantities were disappointing but by about 10:00 at night, they had syrup coming out of the pan.
I am pretty sure my dad might have been interested in such a machine, but it probably would have sat for years and years on the slab, waiting for attention. We would have walked around it, season after season, never even seeing it anymore. Our successes were usually human-powered. Certainly there were machines to do the work we did, but there is much less maintenance required if the work is done by people. And there is a lot more socializing. Heinz figures out how to do everything by himself, or with his family. My dad rarely did any big project alone. He had to plant corn alone, but I still remember helping him change seed plates and dump fertilizer bags into the hopper.
As usual, this topic is too big and can't be finished right now. I never imagined in a million years that I would ever see the sorghum making process again. 45 years later, same sticky juice, different visionaries making it happen.
Our dad Tony learned about farming by traveling around and visiting other farms, mostly in the South but all across the country. Our winter trips always had a farm visiting component -- we would be driving through Louisiana on the way to California and Hawaii and the four of us kids would be lounging around in the back of the bus and we would groan with anticipated boredom when we turned into a driveway of some farm with equipment strewn all around a ramshackle barn. Oh, Dad, why do we have to stop? But he always had a project he was thinking about and he needed to find out how to do it, and in those days there were no sustainable agriculture conferences. There were just farms and farmers, and we had to drive to those farms and hang around while our father introduced himself to men with incomprehensible Southern accents.Most people think that a Southern accent is slow -- not really. It's more like the mouth is full of marbles and there are efficient ways to talk around those marbles, but the words are nearly impossible to understand. Our dad was kind of a shy guy but he would ask any farmer anything and those guys could stand and talk with their arms folded, leaning on a pickup truck for hours.
Back in those days, the early 1970s, he was interested in self-sufficiency. We had a milk cow and draft horses and beef cattle and we grew the food for those animals and we had a vegetable business and all that was missing was a sweetener. I don't know why honey never really grabbed his imagination. Not enough opportunity for mechanization, I bet. And way too solitary.
Sorghum is a grass like corn, gets about ten or twelve feet tall with a red clump of seeds at the top. Dad wasn't interested in the seeds (which can be ground up for flour), he was focused on the juice. Making sorghum molasses means squeezing the juice out of the cane, capturing it, boiling it until the water evaporates. Deceptively simple. Really a lot of trouble.
I don't think he ever thought of sorghum as a commercial venture, so the work was always done by friends and family. There may have been workers present but I doubt anyone was getting paid. On a hot and sticky weekend afternoon, we would go out to the patch with sticks and we would strip the leaves off the sorghum plants. Then an adult with a machete would cut down the sorghum and behead it, leaving the canes and the seed heads on the ground. Children and adults would gather up these unwieldy, long and very heavy stalks and load them onto a truck or trailer. Already we could smell the sugar.
The sorghum mill was in the front field that we didn't own but we used for many years (where there is now a subdivision with the tellingly boring name of Middleton). For the first years the mill was powered by a long pole that a horse or a human would push, by walking around and around in a tethered circle. This was super slow and pretty soon there was an upgrade. Eventually it was powered by a small tractor with a long, wide belt that connected the tractor to the mill. Definitely dangerous in every possible way. I can't remember exactly how that power was converted to turning the heavy cast iron cylinders that squished the canes, but Lani or Charles would be able to tell us. Our job was to feed the sorghum into that little space between the rollers, steadily, without pause. The canes would get sucked in and green juice would spray and trickle out, getting caught in a bucket. The juice was a brilliant green, like no other green.
Eventually we would have enough green juice to put into the big sorghum pan in the front yard, on top of a fire. The sorghum boiled fast until it started to get thick and then we had to slow down the fire and start stirring. Into the night, there was an eerie cloud of steam over a low fire. I remember my mother standing there stirring and stirring in the dark. I also remember the many batches that got burned by mistake. It's hard at the end, to stop the process at the right moment. You are working with a giant vat of boiling liquid over an open fire, trying not to make candy. I think we were generally asleep by the time they got the syrup off. I don't ever remember seeing that part.
For years there were gallon jugs filled with brown syrup in our basement, the metal lids rusting themselves onto the neck of the bottle. We ate a lot of sorghum in my teen years.
Fast forward about 45 years and we get to Heinz and his army of three teenage daughters and their amazing mom. For Heinz it's not just about self-sufficiency, it's about staying ahead of climate change and market forces. Already it is too hot to grow many of the vegetables we all depend on. Sorghum can take the heat. No one else is growing sorghum in our area (for many obvious reasons that I have already described). But Heinz is all about efficiency. He would never imagine cutting cane, picking it up, moving it. He bought a machine that cuts and presses right in the field. And he bought a pan that is designed to cook the syrup in an organized fashion, moving slowly around in a circle and ending up at an exit pipe, ready for bottling.
When I heard that he was just about ready to try his system, I said I want to see this. Make sure to call me. A few days ago, he was satisfied that the machine (a Rube Goldberg contraption from the mid 20th century) was greased and ready and he had thought of everything. Jon and I went down to watch. And damned it if didn't all work. We still had to strip the leaves off with a stick because there were aphids (bug juice, ugh) and that was memorably sweaty work, but the big machine actually cut the cane, fed it through the press and caught the juice. Pretty incredible. The juice was the wrong color, I think, because the cane was too old and dry (a very hot and dry summer) and the quantities were disappointing but by about 10:00 at night, they had syrup coming out of the pan.
I am pretty sure my dad might have been interested in such a machine, but it probably would have sat for years and years on the slab, waiting for attention. We would have walked around it, season after season, never even seeing it anymore. Our successes were usually human-powered. Certainly there were machines to do the work we did, but there is much less maintenance required if the work is done by people. And there is a lot more socializing. Heinz figures out how to do everything by himself, or with his family. My dad rarely did any big project alone. He had to plant corn alone, but I still remember helping him change seed plates and dump fertilizer bags into the hopper.
As usual, this topic is too big and can't be finished right now. I never imagined in a million years that I would ever see the sorghum making process again. 45 years later, same sticky juice, different visionaries making it happen.
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