Sorghum Landrace Mix

Sorghum is one of humanity’s oldest cultivated grains, sustaining cultures across Africa, Asia, and the Americas for thousands of years as a resilient, nutritious staple in hot and drought-prone regions. This diverse sorghum seed mix offers a broad collection of international heirloom sorghum varieties grown alongside sorghum–sudangrass, intentionally allowed to cross-pollinate and adapt as a living population.

Plants from this mix may vary in height, stalk thickness, leaf shape, seed head size, sweetness, and maturity timing. Some plants produce dense grain heads suitable for human food, while others excel at biomass, forage, or syrup production. This variability is a feature, not a flaw, allowing growers to select seed over time for grain, fodder, sweetness, or overall performance in their specific climate.

As a food crop, sorghum grain is naturally gluten-free and traditionally used for porridges, flatbreads, fermented foods, popping grain, and flour. Sweet-stem types can be pressed or chewed for their sugary juice, while immature seed heads and tender shoots have long been used as animal and human fodder in traditional systems. Growers interested in landrace development are encouraged to save seed from plants with desirable culinary traits.

In the field, this mix functions exceptionally well as a warm-season cover crop. Rapid growth provides dense ground cover that suppresses weeds, shades soil, and protects against erosion. Deep, fibrous roots improve soil structure, increase water infiltration, and contribute organic matter below ground. When cut, plants regrow vigorously, making them ideal for chop-and-drop mulching, green manure, grazing systems, and summer fallows.

This seed mix is especially well suited to regenerative agriculture, permaculture, dryland farming, and climate-resilient food systems. Rather than a uniform commercial variety, it is a dynamic gene pool designed to evolve with your land, producing food, building soil, and increasing resilience year after year. Many specimens have perennialized for us on our farm.

Sorghum bicolor