FIGURE 212.—Atlas sorgo (left) standing erect, and Kansas Orange sorgo (right) badly lodged after fall rains. Agronomy farm plots, Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station, Manhattan, Kans., September, 1927
SORGO Known As Atlas Yields Well and Resists Lodging
Atlas is the name recently given to a new and promising variety of sorgo developed in cooperative sorghum-breeding experiments at the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station. The name Atlas was chosen because of its strong stalks which resist lodging.
Atlas sorgo is a pedigree selection from a cross between Blackhull kafir and Sourless sorgo, made by I. N. Farr, a farmer and sorghum breeder of Stockton, Kans. Mr. Farrsent hybrid heads to the Kansas station. Headrows were grown, and in 1923 the strain recently named Atlas was selected as being the most promising.
Since 1923 this selection has been tested in varietal plots at the Manhattan and Hays stations and on the southeastern Kansas experimental fields. In 1927 and 1928 it was grown in direct comparison with other varieties by a number of Kansas farmers who cooperate with the Kansas station in conducting local varietal tests.
In nearly all of these tests Atlas has made good yields of both forage and grain, although the forage yields usually were not quite equal to those of Kansas Orange, the most popular variety of sorgo now grown in eastern Kansas. The tests indicate that in general Atlas sorgo may be expected to yield 80 to 90 per cent as much forage per acre as Kansas Orange. It is too tall and late for western Kansas.
The advantage of Atlas over Kansas Orange lies in two important characters, i. e., stiff stalks and white, palatable grain. Atlas has the stiff stalks and the white seed of its kafir parent and the sweet, juicy stalks and leafiness of the sorgo parent. Only one other sorghum variety, Sunrise kafir, that is grown on farms in the United States, has this particular combination of characters. Atlas sorgo has much stronger stalks than Sunrise kafir and produces higher yields of forage.
In 1927 and 1928 the dairy department of the Kansas station grew Atlas sorgo on a field scale for use as a silage crop. In both seasons the Atlas sorgo was lodged much less (fig. 212) than adjacent fields of Kansas Orange. The ability of Atlas sorgo to resist lodging has also been very clearly demonstrated in the varietal testing fields in southeastern Kansas.
Feeding trials with silage of these two varieties, conducted by the dairy department during the winter of 192728, indicated that silage of Atlas sorgo is about equal to that of Kansas Orange. During the same winter, grain of Atlas sorgo and of Dawn (Dwarf Blackhull) kafir, a standard commercial variety, was fed to hogs at the Hays station in self-feeders. The grain of Atlas sorgo was found to be just as palatable as that of Dawn kafir.
Atlas sorgo will grade as white kafir on the terminal markets. Thus the farmer in eastern Kansas and similar areas who grows Atlas sorgo either can feed the white, palatable grain to his livestock and obtain the same results as with kafir or he can market it and receive kafir prices for it. He can do neither of these things with the brown, bitter, unpalatable seed of the varieties of sweet sorghum now commonly grown.