Download the book of conference abstracts and browse the photos of the week

"I was so pleased to see the engagement and enthusiasm from our global sorghum community," said Jurandir Magalhaes, Chair of the Global Sorghum Association (GSA). "It was powerful and highly rewarding to see hundreds of delegates come together from more than 40 countries and have all that diversity and knowledge united around sorghum's current innovations and future developments."

The five-day long conference showcased the latest in current and developing sorghum science and highlighted sorghum's role as a key solution for numerous global challenges, including climate change impacts, evolving nutritional needs, and a shift in market demands for both human food and livestock feed.

CLIMATE CHANGE DRIVING URGENT NEED FOR RESILIENCE, DROUGHT TOLERANCE

Keynote speaker Nathalie de Noblet-Ducoudré (Université Paris-Saclay, France) presented the current state of climate change and its potential futures and posed the question, In what climatic context does the evolution of agriculture take place? With warming trends continuing, rapidly escalating hazards will rise in frequency. These include more intense heatwaves, heavier precipitation, more frequent drought, and new compound events (such as a combination of drought and heatwaves). Climate trends have both observed and projected impacts on agriculture on a global scale. Throughout the week, conference participants intensely explored sorghum's role in responding to these changes as a resilient, heat tolerant and water smart cereal crop.

SHIFTING CLIMATES REQUIRE FASTER, MORE RESPONSIVE BREEDING PROGRAMS

Speakers Graeme Hammer (University of Queensland, Australia) and Laura Mayor (Corteva Agriscience, USA) discussed how the interplay of crop simulation and experimentation enables crop improvement to leverage biological knowledge in order to develop improved farming systems. The best systems optimize the trade-off between increased productivity and risk. It was noted that climate change is requiring breeding programs to deliver varieties faster; this is crucial to enable agriculture to adapt and, in some cases, it is becoming necessary to breed for environments that don't currently exist in breeding programs' targeted regions. Prediction methods are becoming more important for plant breeders and increasingly need to be integrated with crop modelling and improved methods of measuring traits to enable faster genetic gain.  

EUROPE'S MARKET NEEDS AND SHIFTING PRODUCTION SYSTEMS EXPAND OPPORTUNITIES FOR SORGHUM

European experts Valérie Brochet (FNPSMS, France), Boris Parent (INRAE, France), and David Pot (CIRAD, France) offered insight into the European value chain and market angle, demonstrating how sorghum offers great prospects for seed breeders, farmers, industry, and customers. To overcome current obstacles, it is key for sorghum research and production to expand and to develop R&D investments in order to generate greater varieties of products for dynamic consumer demands. With this in mind, they noted it is essential to identify in which specific environmental scenarios a given combination of trait values would result in a comparative advantage for plant production. Exploring intraspecific diversity through mobilizing phenotyping and crop modeling is key as compared to opposing performance of different crops as a whole. Additionally, in response to the rapidly evolving climatic and socio-economic conditions worldwide, it was emphasized that there is a need for active research collaboration between Europe and Africa in sorghum production and utilization to foster innovation and facilitate adaptation to diverse contexts.

GLOBAL CONSUMPTION PATTERNS AND DIETARY NEEDS PUSH INCREASED DEMAND FOR SORGHUM AS A FOOD INGREDIENT

A roundtable discussion on sorghum products and consumption included Industry researchers and professionals Kwaku Gyebi Duodu (University of Pretoria, South Africa), Monia Caramma (Switzerland), and Earl Roemer (Nu Life Market, USA) who remarked on the global patterns of sorghum utilization, which indicate a shift to greater consumption of sorghum as a food grain and a decrease in its utilization as animal feed or a biofuel feedstock. The demand for sorghum-based food products continues to increase in response to dietary needs, consumer market opportunities and novel opportunities addressed by food product innovators. Integrated production and product systems have the opportunity to increase food quality and consumer and farmer value for sorghum while mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon.

CROP INNOVATIONS AND SUSTAINABLE INTENSIFICATION NECESSARY TO MAXIMIZE SORGHUM'S PERFORMANCE ACROSS DIVERSE ENVIRONMENTS

James Schnable (University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA) and Dilys S. MacCarthy (University of Ghana) discussed how to exploit existing phenotypic data for crop innovations and define ideotype sorghum as well as combining quantitative genomics with deep learning 2D and 3D to characterize plant responses to stress. Other topics included sustainability intensification practices that are required to optimize the production and the ecosystemic services in West and Central Africa agrosystems. The nexus of People-Planet-Profit needs to be considered for impact of breeding on agrosystems and human health.

The conference program, speaker information and more are available on the conference website, and photos can be viewed on the conference Flickr page. Under the leadership of the GSA, the next Sorghum in the 21st Century Global Sorghum Conference will be hosted in September 2026 by Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, which serves as the national headquarters of the United Sorghum Checkoff Program.

"We look forward to building on this strength for the 2026 conference in Texas in the U.S.A.," said Magalhaes. "We know the community will continue to cultivate the connections they made in Montpellier, and we are excited for future opportunities to continue to strengthen those to drive new innovation and opportunities for sorghum."