Finally, Grain Sorghum

We end the week with grain sorghum acres and production

Photo by Luis Rodriguez on Unsplash

This ends our posts on crop base acres and PLC “production”.

List 1: Top 10 counties by grain sorghum base acres

Four Texas counties, three Kansas counties, plus New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Colorado — the heart of the Sorghum Belt. Nueces County, Texas leads at 135,385 base acres, down on the Gulf Coast near Corpus Christi. But this is a small program: total U.S. grain sorghum base runs only about 8.2 million acres, the smallest crop in this whole series and less than a tenth of corn. And the yield spread is wide — Nueces is enrolled at just 59.5 bushels and Baca, Colorado at 34.5, while Deaf Smith, Texas posts 91.2 bushels on irrigation up in the Panhandle.

List 2: Top 10 counties by Total Grain Sorghum PLC Yield

Deaf Smith, Texas had the second-most base acres but jumps to first on total program bushels — 130,639 acres at a 91.2-bushel yield is nearly 11.9 million bushels, almost half again as much as anyone else. Nueces, Texas had the most base in the country but its 59.5-bushel Gulf Coast yield drops it to second. The biggest casualties of the yield reshuffle are Baca, Colorado (34.5 bushels) and Cimarron, Oklahoma (45.6 bushels), both of which fall out of the top ten entirely; Finney, Kansas and Wharton, Texas take their place on stronger yields.

List 3: Top 10 counties by grain sorghum PLC yield per acre

A note on this one. Sorghum’s raw per-acre list is junk at the very top — it’s littered with counties carrying one, five, or sixteen base acres showing physically impossible “yields” (one 16-acre county is listed at 387 bushels, which no sorghum field on earth produces). Those are FSA recordkeeping artifacts, not real productivity. So, this list shows the ten highest-yielding counties among those carrying at least 1,000 base acres — the counties where the number actually means something.

Even cleaned up, the familiar pattern holds at the top: irrigated desert Southwest leads, with Hidalgo and Luna in New Mexico and Cochise in Arizona all clearing 100 bushels. But sorghum’s per-acre list has something the others didn’t — a deep run of north-central Kansas dryland counties (Jewell, Smith, Washington, Cloud, plus Republic just outside the ten) posting high-80s to low-90s yields on enormous bases of 43,000 to 58,000 acres. That’s the dryland sorghum heartland delivering yield and acreage together, no irrigation required.

And one county quietly does it all. Deaf Smith, Texas ranks second on base acres, first on total program bushels, and fifth on per-acre yield — the only sorghum county to land near the top of all three lists. It’s the milo version of the Pinal, Arizona story from the cotton post: big base, big yield, both at once.