Sorghum bicolor is truly amazing and deserves a megathread. not even joking. lots of crop (and animal) species have high variability within that species for different needs of human activity. like there are breeds of cattle selected for dairy over meat. or tomatoes varieties selected for canning vs slicing. or apples varieties for dessert vs cider. corn varieties for human eating vs for feed/processing. this is basic domestication variability.

sorghum--for some reason that white people never bothered to learn from the native africans that gifted it to the world--has varieties for basically everything, and it is awesome at them.

there's grain sorghum that puts on a nice, fat and easily collected seed head which can be milled into flour, fed to livestock, or any of the other things we do with grain. some people call it milo or millet, but the historical record is difficult because lots of things were called lots of things by different people. but occasional "first accounts" of whites learning about it from recent or soon to be colonized places speak a lot about it's value over other grains for its easy of planting/harvest, how well it did in places that other grains wouldn't, and how it didn't exhaust soils.

then there's cane sorghum, which stores up a shitload of chemical energy as plant sugars that can be smashed/collected and boiled down into syrup, get boozy or all the things we like to do with sugary water. think of it like sugar cane, but it can be grown at much higher latitudes, because it hits maturity much quicker than sugar cane. it has a smokier flavor than cane syrup or maple syrup. i think it's superior. if you're in the US near amish/mennonite country, you can usually find it. it's a rougher product because it wasn't integrated into the industrial food system, so there's no standardization of brix scores or viscosity, but it's a sugary syrup. just warm it up a little and and little dab'll do ya.

and there's forage sorghum, which grows fast and tall and puts on a shitload of vegetative growth, which can be dried out and used for like roofing material and simple, primitive construction or grazed on by ruminants and converted into their products (milk, meat, textiles). it outcompetes other forages easily through allelopathic action and outright speed of vertical growth, not to mention its tenacity at growing in poor soils with nutrient issues. it is considered an invasive in parts of the world where it is treated as a weed because it embarrasses the forages white people are more familiar with, so they call it insulting names and turn up their noses at it.

sorghum is the crop that was domesticated by people who apparently knew how to get shit done and if i had to go start civilization on a newly formed volcanic island, i would start a religion about sorghum because we gonna be eating, drinking and living under roofs of it while planting it everywhere. we would ideally have other things, but sorghum would be the special god in the pantheon.