Salty Sorghum

Salt tolerant Sorghum

I have spent several days at ICBA learning a thing or two about the wide variety of crops that can be grown with saline water. Some are already available in Australia. Triticale was one such plant. I saw lots of varieties being trialled, all of which looked very good and showed no signs of salt damage even after 15 dsm water was applied to them. I was told that Cracker Jack (a Heritage Seeds line from Australia) was doing well. There was a very large sorghum trial there. Starting out as a mini core of 35,000 accessions it has been whittled down to 40 and these will be evaluated for their tolerance as well as other agronomic traits. It was interesting to see such variability in one species as the salinity of the irrigation water applied increased. There were some very good results and the future use of sorghum in a saline environment looked good.