Danforth Plant Center to Collaborate With National Sorghum Producers on $65M Climate-Smart Project

Sorghum is an ideal crop to positively contribute to food security and to play a role in mitigating climate change thanks to its inherent traits such as drought tolerance, and its promise as a top carbon-sequestering crop.

Nadia Shakoor, PhD, principal investigator and senior research scientist at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, will be part of the nationwide team working to quantify the climate impact potential for sorghum as part of a five-year, $65 million project led by National Sorghum Producers. The funding for the project has been provided by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through its new Partnerships for Climate Smart Commodities.

Geographically, the project will be carried out on 20,000 sorghum farms covering 4.4 million acres across six states, or an average of 67 percent of the U.S. sorghum industry, per year. The Danforth Plant Science Center stated that if sorghum producers can be given training on and the implementation of climate-smart agricultural practices on a large-scale across sorghum producing regions, and then these practices can be measured, monitored, and verified, it could significantly increase the market channels for this commodity.

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