 I'm Jane Loomis. I live in Clemi City, Indiana, on a small farm that we've built from a soybean corn field that we put up our own barns and started farming when we were old enough to know better. And we decided to work with a sauer-grant on sweet sorghum syrup. It was something we were interested in growing and we partnered with three or four other farms and tried to determine whether it's a sustainable product that you can do on small farms, you know, with a small amount of labor and not much equipment. Sorghum is grain but it is also, it grows in a cane like sugar. It looks a lot like corn but with a seed head on top instead of a tassel and it is drought resistant and grown pretty much all over the world. But the cane can be pressed. You can use the grain on the top if it ripens but before that if you cut the grain off the top, the grain head off the top, you have a cane similar to sugar cane. It can be pressed into a juice and then evaporated into a great sweet syrup. We actually take it to an Amish farmer who has a steam press and a steam driven press and evaporator and we grow the cane, we harvest it, haul it to Middlebury, Indiana which is northern Indiana about an hour from here in trailers and he presses it for us and bottles it so it's all done in a short time. Sorghum has a wonderful flavor. It has lots of minerals and vitamins in it and it is much more sustainable. It presses out like seven gallons of juice makes a gallon of of the syrup and that compares the same maple syrup which is about 40 to 1. So it's a it's a lot easier from that standpoint. Last year we grew a honey drip and that's what we're going to grow this year. It did real well, stood good for us. We only had one year that ever went down on us and that was the first year. It's down by the wind. Yeah it goes down by the wind and we learned a little bit down at Sorghum Conference about how to handle that because they had stuff go through a tornado and never went down or a hurricane and never went down but their idea is topping it about a week before they harvest so that's when the head gets real heavy and it wants to fall over and if they get that topped then they'll stand for two or three weeks without no they could have or they said they had a hurricane go through and they were bugging down so. It's a good crop for small acreage use and it's easy to handle and the more we do it that is true we're better you know you start to realize oh yeah this helps with the blowdown this helps with the and we'll plant the same kind now as Urie. Urie Miller we're processing so they were on the same page as him he's going to be ready his equipment will be ready because he's got his acreage process so you start to everything starts to get in sync. The biggest problem has been the marketing in other words the the planting growing it's it's as good any any crop. My role with the project has been working with the farmers who are private family farming on on some of the educational aspects of sharing the news about Sorghum kind of in the community and hosting an event at Mary Lee that the public can come to and showcase the product and the process. We are marketing it to small businesses in the area places that make caramel corn popcorn butcher shops we're working on developing a barbecue sauce based on that we use it in granola and breads that we sell at the farmers market and then of course we a lot of people buy it because that's how they make molasses cookies they use it on pancakes you know you mix it with butter it put it on biscuits it's wonderful so it's really kind of we're trying to reeducate the public on a you know a product that has been used since the 1800s but has sort of fallen out of favor because sugar white sugar is so cheap