[Meagan] Oh here we go.
Today we're exploring sorghum, whose seeds are amongst the thousands of samples stored
at the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado. Sorghum is
one of the most important cereal crops for global food security. It was first domesticated around
6,000 years ago in Ethiopia and Sudan. It then spread across Africa into India and the Middle
East, and eventually made its way into Eastern Asia. It arrived to the U.S. in the 19th century.
Today, the U.S. is the world's top sorghum producer, where it's mostly grown for
livestock feed. But in other places, like Africa, sorghum plays a central role in people's lives.
[Geoff] Most places around the world where sorghum is grown it's actually grown
for staple foods, so it's grown for the breads and porridges and beverages that make up the majority
of people's diets in a lot of semi-arid areas. Sorghum is one of the main crops that people
grow there just for their everyday livelihood. They also use it as building material there,
fencing material or to build their homes, and they also use it to feed their animals so
it's really a multi-purpose crop that fit a lot of needs for people in these semi-arid areas.
[Meagan] Plant geneticists and breeders look at different traits in order to
develop more climate-resistant sorghum varieties.
It's work driven by a passion to positively impact people's lives around the world.
[Geoff] My colleagues in West Africa, one of the things they're working on is trying to take the
best qualities of some of the modern varieties that they've been working on and combining
them with the best qualities of the traditional varieties that have been grown in that region for
thousands of years. I also get to travel to Africa and Haiti and work with farmers here in the U.S.
in the field figuring out how to make the crops better. So for me it really is the best of
both worlds as a scientist to have one foot in the lab and one foot in the field.
[Meagan] Sorghum varies widely in size, shape, and signature characteristics. They can grow from 2 to
20 feet tall and display seemingly endless variation of grain colors and seed heads.
[Geoff] This type of variety with this really dense seed head and the curving stem, this is the
type of variety that would be grown just south of the Sahara or in the horn of Africa in some of the
driest and hottest places anywhere in the world where people grow crops. By contrast,
we might see a variety like this in the more humid parts of Africa and this open shape to the
seed head allows the crop to dry off so it's less likely to get moldy before harvest. In the crop
breeding and research world, one of the big questions is:
when you get a great new variety for one region, can it be successful in another region?
[Meagan] A great example illustrating the importance of that big question was when
a devastating aphid infestation began tearing through the sorghum crops across the Americas.
[Geoff] The crop could have been completely wiped out in some countries,
including developing countries like Haiti where it's really important for food security.
[Meagan] Luckily a breeder in Haiti happened upon a resistance trait to
this aphid that had been preserved in genebanks for half a century--
a trait that likely arose from thousands of years ago in a farmer's field in Ethiopia.
This allowed Geoff and his team to develop the technology needed to share it with the world.
[Geoff] It happened to be that this was the one gene
that saved sorghum. U.S. Department of Agriculture, it saves 45,000 different varieties
of sorghum-- why do you need so many? Well, you never really know.
[Meagan] And that's exactly why it's so crucial to make accessible this knowledge of the incredible
diversity available, so we can continue to strengthen food security around the world,
especially in places hit hardest by climate change.