Sorghum for $9

I'm was in St Louis this past weekend, attending the Best if Missouri Market at the Botanical Gardens. Sandhill Farm—my old community—used to participate regularly in this event, but it's a by-invitation-only deal and we lost favor with the selection committee back around 2002. Sandhill was able to achieve rehabilitation this year by combining its application with the Milkweed Mercantile at Dancing Rabbit, who were first-time applicants.

Here's a promotional image for the event used by a local television station in the Gateway City:

Note the prominent display (left of center) of a half-pint of watermelon jelly made by Mrs. Milkweed (who masquerades in day-to-day life as Alline Anderson, my neighbor and fellow impresario in the condiment business).

Alline had secured an end booth in the center aisle of Tent #2, which gave us three sides to sell from. That turned out to be brilliant as we were peddling stuff fast and furious, keeping three people busy most of the time. We were on duty for 21 hours during the stretch from 6 pm Friday through 5 pm Sunday answering inquires, giving out samples, wrapping purchases, running credit cards, and making change. (Boy, did it ever feel good to sit down at the end of the day!)

The highlight of the weekend was having Brenda Stemler stop by our table. She sampled our sorghum and bought a pint on Saturday. The reason that's a big deal is that she's a past president of NSSPPA (National Sweet Sorghum Producers & Processors Association), and her family has been making sorghum since the Depression (the one that started in 1929; not the one in 2008). That means she absolutely knew good sorghum when she found it, and couldn't resist buying some of ours. A high compliment.

Then she came back Sunday and bought a quart for her father—the paterfamilias of the sorghum-making Stemlers. An even higher compliment.

Reflecting on the Stemler tradition got me thinking about how long I've been associated with sorghum making. I go back pretty far myself. It was amusing to realize that there have been a lot changes since I first started attending fairs for Sandhill's in 1977, where we sold sorghum at the Bethel Harvest Fest (now defunct), and at the inaugural edition of the Hannibal Historic Folklife Festival. That year you could buy a gallon of Sandhill sorghum for $9.
Today, you can still buy a jar for $9—but only a pint. Interestingly, that's about what a gallon of raw juice will yield after we cook it down. Now we sell a gallon of syrup for $50. We've come a long way, baby.

In fact, I recall that a number of our elderly customers back in the late '70s were fond of telling us that they used to be able to buy a gallon pail of sorghum for $1, and that their parents used to buy it for as little as 25¢. That last must have been before even the Stemlers were in the sweet sorghum business. Think of it: in a century the price has for a gallon of biscuit topping has risen 200 times!

I tell you, $9 just doesn't buy today what it did then.

The Good, the Wet, and the Unplumbed

In the next day or two I had been hoping to do some trench work out back of Ma'ikwe's house, to repair a leaky water line from our newly constructed cistern. Ma'ikwe was going to scare up a couple of strong backs to help with the digging and I was going to handle the plumbing. We were thinking the whole affair might be managed in half a day (providing only that we successfully aggregated all the replacement parts needed to effect the repair).

But those plans got washed away yesterday as northeast Missouri was blessed with 3.3 inches of liquid sunshine. It's hard to believe we had a drought last year.

(When I was just a sprat, I spent many summers between ages 8-16 at a boys camp in northern Minnesota. It's where I learned wilderness canoeing and how to tie a tautline hitch—both of which have stayed with me for decades. The camp director, Doug Bobo, used to tell parents with a straight face, "It never rains at Camp Easton… occasionally we get some liquid sunshine; but it never rains.")

While the rain was poorly timed for next week's trench welfare, at Sandhill we were more fortunate. We hit the weather perfectly for transplanting our sorghum seedlings. Starting Thursday morning we were able to get all 100 flats in the ground by Friday afternoon—mere hours before the rain arrived. Whew! 

While the flats all have the same outer dimensions, they have different numbers of cells: some have 200 (10x20) and others have 242 (11x22). Either way, it was a lot of sorghum seedlings—perhaps 22,000—enough to plant about two acres, not quite half our average crop. It takes a five-person crew to transplant sorghum and it's one my favorite agricultural jobs, in part because it takes a five-person crew. That is, it has to be done cooperatively, as a group.

One person drives the tractor (being careful to keep the rows straight and properly spaced). The other four are riding on the transplanter, which is an ingenious ground-driven device that allows the crew to put in two rows of 4-6 inch high plants with a near-perfect stand in about five minutes per 100 yards. Even though the tractor is just puttering along in low gear, it's a beautiful sight to look up at the end of a pass and see a long line of upright green seedlings where there had been just bare field minutes ago.

The four people on the transplanter are assigned two per row, with each pair alternately placing seedlings into the rubber grips of a revolving wheel that, in sequence:
o  Receives plants
o  Clamps them
o  Opens a furrow in the ground
o  Releases the plant into the ground
o  Allows a squirt of water into the furrow
o  Pushes the furrow closed, tamping the soil against the plant
o  Comes around for another pass

There are six rubber grips on the wheel, which means that six seedlings are planted every revolution. It's a pretty trippy implement that we only use once a year.

The reason we do a substantial portion of our sorghum crop as transplants (rather than direct seeding, which is far less work) is that we're organic and it can be very difficult maintaining weed control in the row. All farmers rely on cultivators to kill weeds between the rows; but that doesn't touch the weeds that grow in the row with your crop. While conventional farmers mainly rely on herbicides, we have only three choices: a) rotary hoeing; b) hand weeding; or c) transplanting.

Option A is running a mechanical device with curved metals spikes over the rows at moderately high speed, such that it disturbs the top inch or so of soil but no deeper. If you time it just right the deeper sorghum roots will survive what is lethal to foxtail—our biggest weed problem. At least that's the theory. For this to be effective, there is a narrow window where the weeds are vulnerable and the sorghum is not. If the fields are too wet to cultivate during that window, you won't kill the weeds.

Option B is something we'd rather not do, but occasionally need to if we're going to have a decent crop. There's been many an August over the years where community crews will go out to the fields at first light to hoe in the rows for a couple of hours, before the summer sun drives us from the fields.

Option C is the payoff for all the extra labor devoted to planting the seedling trays and riding the transplanter. When you insert 4-6 inch high plants into a bare field, the weeds can never catch up to the head start given the sorghum plants and we needn't worry about weeding in the row.

All of that said, we don't do our entire sorghum crop as transplants, because we don't want to put that much investment in a system we only use once a year, and occasionally the weather conditions are such that the direct sown crops outperform the transplants. Think of it as hedging.

Now if I can only get the mud to dry out in Ma'ikwe's backyard, I'll be all set. 

(Farming is highly weather dependent, and the weather is highly undependable, which leads to almost unlimited opportunities for humility—and frustration if you're under the illusion that you're in control. While farmers often complain about rain inconveniencing their outdoor work plans, they know better than to complain too loudly—just try living without it.)

Wall-eyed in Michigan

I achieved one of my life goals this weekend—seeing Sandhill's name on Zingerman's map of suppliers for their Roadhouse Restaurant! 

[This is also my first foray into posting images as part of my blog, and I can't think of a more noteworthy achievement to offer up as my inaugural graphic.]

This is a big deal as the folks at Zingerman's are fanatics about quality and this stamp of approval is a Côte d'Or sobriquet that money can't buy—you have to earn it. As sorghum is Sandhill's signature organic food product, it's incredibly satisfying to gain this coveted recognition. 

As sorghum makers we've been learning our craft since 1977. Over the years we've reinvented our cooking process twice, until finally hitting on what we're satisfied is a terrific process.

In the Beginning…
We started with a two pan batch system cooked over a direct wood fire. We had the pans custom made from stainless steel, with the first pan twice the size of the second and placed higher, so that the juice could flow easily into the smaller pan when the first batch was half cooked. In this method one batch of juice was cooked from start to finish all together. This represented a doubling of output from the single pan method that we first learned by apprenticing with neighbors.

When we hit out stride during the sorghum harvest, we'd cook 36 hours straight out of 48, meaning that one or two people would have to take cooking shifts through the night. It was exhausting.

If at First You Don't Succeed…
Not satisfied with the pace or control of the batch method, we switched to a Stubbs single pan continuous flow process. The pan was divided into two parts, connected at one end—like a giant U. We'd dribble raw juice in one end of the U, have it slowly progress along 16 feet, turn the corner, and then travel 16 feet back the other way, separated by the partition. By the time it had completed it's 32-foot journey (it took about three hours) the sorghum would be done and we'd drain it off. This doubled our productivity, but we were still cooking over a direct wood fire and things would occasionally get hairy when too much sorghum finished all at once. If you had a strong fire, the difference between perfect sorghum and something overcooked beyond salability was about 90 seconds. Under those conditions, we didn't have a lot of people volunteering to be in charge of cooking.

While we no longer needed to cook through the night with this system (hurray!), we'd typically start before dawn and would often cook well into the evening, making for looong days.

Third Time's the Charm…
Finally, in 2006, we switched to using live steam. We bought an old boiler on eBay, hauled it home, and set it up outside our Sugar Shack (where we cook the juice). We still use wood to stoke the boiler, but the sorghum is cooked by copper pipes immersed in the juice, and the steam is controlled by a valve. The trick to consistently producing excellent sorghum is cooking the juice as rapidly as possible—without losing control. With live steam we can take juice at room temperature and bring it to a boil in about two minutes. If we have too much sorghum ready at once, we can simply choke off the steam and slow everything down until the surge has been digested.

With our current method there are three pans set up in a cascade, where the juice flows from one to the next via float valves. In each pan there are channels that the juice must flow through maze-like to get from the entry point to the exit, merrily cooking and condenser as it goes. 

With our current method we generally start after first coffee in the morning and almost always wrap up before dinner time. Very civilized.

• • •

One of the joys of being in the sorghum business is that we're continuing a tradition that came into the area with the early settlers of the mid-19th Century. While we rely on modern technology for stainless steel pans (sorghum juice is incredibly acidic and literally eats carbon steel) there's nothing about our cooking process that relies on technology newer than stationary motors with flat belt pulleys. Our sorghum mill, as near as we can tell, was manufactured circa 1900. The wood that feeds the boiler is harvested sustainably from our property. The cane is cut by hand using machetes, and hauled to our mill with wagons pulled by our fleet of three gas-powered tractors—all of which were manufactured 50+ years ago.

I think it's pretty cool that we're producing high-quality sorghum with a low-tech system. And now we have photographic proof that Zingerman's agrees with the lofty opinion we've always held for our product. Next time you're in Ann Arbor, I suggest you stop by for a meal at the Roadhouse (located on the southwest corner of Jackson & Maple on the west side of town). If you order biscuits, ask for some sorghum to go along with the butter and they'll bring it right out. In addition to experiencing a traditional and distinctive American dish, you'll be getting a sweet burst of Sandhill in every bite. 

The Calm After the Storm

Continuing my recent construction saga, I had a perfectly lovely weekend not working on Ma'ikwe's cistern. After storming the work site for seven of the previous nine days, forced marches were no longer needed, and thus no blocks were lifted nor any cement bags opened the last three days.

Once the backhoe arrived to dig out the site July 14 (history buffs may note that we liberated the project from its clay incarceration on the 222nd anniversary of Bastille Day), we pushed the pedal to the metal in an effort to complete our below grade work before there was another cave-in. This meant battling temperatures in the high 90s on a daily basis, yet we reached an important milestone last Friday afternoon when we completed surface bonding the walls—which makes them both watertight and strong enough to withstand backfilling.

Everyone on the crew was relieved that there would be no cistern work over the weekend, and it was interesting to note the release we felt when a thunderstorm rumbled into northeast Missouri Friday evening. Having weathered the storm of construction, we were uniquely poised to appreciate Nature's storm right afterward.

There was no question that our gardens and crops could use the water. After a wet spring we've received less than one inch of total precipitation this month, and nothing significant since a half-inch shower July 12 (to say we're dry would be like noting that Roy Orbison could sing a little). Yet if the rain had arrived any earlier we would have been holding our collective breath about another collapse of the excavated walls—and the horror of starting over again.

So much of country living is about working with what the weather gives you. While it seemed we were fighting Nature by undertaking concrete work in the elevated heat indices of mid-July, we actually found the perfect 10-day window to complete a project that absolutely needed dryness. Whew!

There is something exquisitely sweet about a rain that arrives right after the hay is in the barn. Not only do you get to enjoy the immediate drop in temperatures, you also get to exhale the tensions you'd been carrying for days hoping that it wouldn't rain. The thing you'd been fearing is now suddenly transformed into a joy, as simply as excising the "h" from threat to yield treat.

It's the same for us each fall when we're trying to allow our sorghum crop (one third of Sandhill's income harvested in three week rush) maximum time to ripen, while not losing the crop through frost damage. We get the best yield if the seed is dead ripe, yet we're gambling marginal increases against the possibility of catastrophic loss if we're caught by the mercury dropping to 28 degrees or lower with the crop still standing. (A hard freeze bursts the cells walls of the cane and when temperatures rise again, the oxygen exposure can sour the juice beyond saleability within 24 hours.)

Every day we carefully interpret the tea leaves of the long-range weather forecast and make decisions about how long we dare wait before sending the campesinos out into the fields with machetes. When, finally, the crop is all in, there is a palpable relief that invariably accompanies the first hard freeze. With the sorghum in the barrel we're no longer vulnerable, and can appreciate how the frost puts our summer garden out of its misery, knocks back the flies, and signals the advent of the heating season (think cups of coffee with a good book sitting near the woodstove).

When you farm, you necessarily dance with the weather. However, as a partner, the weather is notoriously capricious, and it's nice to get through a whole play list now and then without any missteps or anyone cutting in.

Transition

Sandhill's sorghum harvest ended today. Overall, the 2008 yield was average, yet the quality was superb—perhaps the best in our 32-year history. So there are a lot of smiles on the farm right now.

Even though we've yet to experience a killing frost, letting the boiler fire die out for the last time is a major marker in our lives. We can exhale. Though there will continue to be garden produce coming in right up until the first freeze, the pace will slacken off. The larders are full and the frost can no longer hurt us much.

• • •

Ordinarily, the rhythm of my life includes October at home for the harvest, followed by November on the road—for community networking and process consulting. It's about as reliable as the coming cold weather. Sometimes the transition is soft, with a week or more of wrapping up at home before I hit the road.

This year, however, the transition will be abrupt. It happens tonight, in fact. As I type this, I'm cooking down my last batch of pepper relish of the year. Tomorrow the agenda setters arrive for the fall meetings of the Fellowship for Intentional Community (for the first time in 22 years, the meetings will be within walking distance—at our neighboring community, Dancing Rabbit, just three miles away). Tomorrow I lay down my homesteading hat, and don my community networker chapeau.

Caroline Estes (Alpha Farm) is already in town (offering two days of consensus and facilitation training in exchnage for lower hosting fees). Tomorrow's arrivals include the rest of the Oversight Committee (which is responsible for drafting the board meeting agenda): Jenny Upton (Shannon Farm), accompanied by her partner and former FIC board member Dan Questenberry; Marty Klaif (also from Shannon); George Caneda (Ganas), with partner Julie Grieve; Harvey Baker (Dunmire Hollow); and Bill Becker, our Treasurer. All of these folks are long-time friends.

For the first time, I will have the pleasure of cooking dinner for my visiting friends in front of an organizational meeting. Although I've known Dan and Caroline for more than 20 years, it will be the first time either of them have been to Sandhill, and I'm looking forward to having them be our guests. With as much traveling as I do, I have the occasion to be hosted by others all the time (indeed, within the last nine months I've stayed overnight at every one of the communities listed in the prior paragraph). It's nice to have the chance to return the favor.

So tonight, after I can the last pints of relish, I'll read through the reports and start crafting the agenda for Thursday's Oversight Committee meeting. It'll be a bit schizophrenic immersing myself in the world of FIC without having left home or changed scenery (I usually have a long car ride or a train trip to serve as a psychic buffer), but I'll figure it out.

Why We Make Pure Sorghum

We're in the midst of our sorghum season at Sandhill (today is our fourth cooking, with perhaps 4-5 to go), and we got this letter in the mail today, from Francis Baumli in St Louis—whom none of us have ever met, to our knowledge—written on a typewriter (remember those?):

"Dear People,

I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, but there are times when that familiar (one might even say nostalgic) taste of vanilla ice cream is what I crave, so that becomes my choice over chocolate.

Similarly, I prefer the taste of molasses to sorghum, but sorghum has that unique sweet-sour taste, and sometimes this pure sorghum taste is exactly what I want.

For years there had been a problem. I could not find pure sorghum anywhere. Any jar labeled "sorghum" was actually mixed with molasses, or corn syrup, or that well-camouflaged culprit called "dehydrated cane juice." Born in 1948, in rural Northwest Missouri, sorghum was a constant part (almost a staple) of my youth. But I had done without it for years, and when I would describe its unique taste to friends and family, I think they began viewing me as a sentimental old fool imagining things. So I wanted to buy some pure sorghum and share it with them, partly to convince them that I knew what I was talking about, but mainly to give them a taste of something delicious they had never had.

Then lo and behold! I found your product in a health food store, and all skepticism on the part of friends and family has been put to rest. Their gustatory response to it has been initially tentative but always subsequently enthusiastic.

So thank you for making pure sorghum again available! And for making an old-fashioned food over into a modern-day choice!

P.S. Should it ever behoove your advertising purposes, you can feel free to use this letter, which is nothing less than an enthusiastic endorsement of your product."

Well, we're behooved. What a nice letter! It's been our experience that there is always a market for high-quality food. And today, there is an ever-increasing demand for unadulterated food as well. This is our 32nd year making sorghum. While we've tinkered with our methods of production over the years, we've only made pure sorghum and only grown it organically. And we always will.

Thanks, Francis.

Sorghum Season!

At Sandhill today we cooked our first sorghum of the 2008 season. (Can fall colors be far behind?) It was a beautiful day, with temps in the lows 80s. We made about 50 gallons of satisfyingly light syrup, and have already filled several cases of the new crop in our distincive 1-lb and 1-quart jars. A good start.

Ten days ago it was hard to imagine that conditoons would be so favorable. Our fields were totally saturated with the 6+ inches of rain that fell in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. For the first time in more than 15 harvests it was beginning to look like we were going to have to trudge through the mud to extract the cane, and that we wouldn't be able to drive on the fields. However (cross your fingers), that didn't happen. The skies cleared after the deluge ended Sept 14, we stop working on an ark, and it hasn't rained since. We've been lucky.

In addition, we have a crew of eager labor exchangers from Twin Oaks, our sister community in Virginia, who are helping us this opening week of the season—swarming the fields like locusts, pulling down the leaves, cutting the stalks with machetes, and stacking the cut cane in little piles, where they await the wagons that will collect it for the ride to the mill. Sorghum season is a social highlight of our calendar. Based on the notion that many hands make light work, this is the month when we most encourage people to visit, turning drudgery into festival. While it's a logistical challenge finding tent space for everyone and keeping the ravenous harvest crew fed from our community gardens, it's a labor of love. Our aim is to turn complexity into conviviality, and for the most part we succeed.

After more than three decades of sorghum harvests we've learned to trust the magic. We put out the call for help every year, and every year the people arrive when we need them. If we plant it, they will come. This is community at its best.

• • •

Today was also a day for working out the kinks in our systems. During the off-season, we've been tinkering. After limping along the last couple years, at the end of last season we bit the bullet and dsiassembled our ancient sorghum press. We had the giant rollers—gradually worn down by decades of pressing cane and the corrosive action of raw sorghum juice—re-milled, hopefully to last another 100 years. Today was the first trial with everything re-assembled, and there were some troubles getting everything seated properly. There was a lot of starting and stopping to tweak various nuts and bolts in our never-ending quest to extract every last drop of sweet juice from the stalks. When the mill is properly adjusted, the pith in the center of the stalk emerges from the last set of rollers bone-dry.

Meanwhile, down at the Sugar Shack (where we boil the juice) we also had some new features, most noticeably a foot-pedal-activated pump to transfer the finished sorghum into 55-gallon holding barrels (from which we bottle). We've been making sorghum since 1977 and, until today, we always transferred the finished sorghum from the cooking pans to the barrels in heavy-duty plastic buckets that involved heavy-duty lifting. Boy, is it nice to be done with that job!

• • •

There are still many hundreds of gallons of sorghum to make, and we'll be at for most of the next four weeks. The weather, of course, could deliver anything over that stretch, and who knows, we may have to deal with mud yet. Still, we've had an auspicious beginning, and for tonight at least, everyone on the farm is pretty happy about it.