Press Release

In the middle of Government seriousness in developing food diversification, PTBA through Integrated Training Ground SIMANTRI (Sistem Manajemen Pertanian Terintegrasi) were supervising Pondok Pesantren Darul Yatim Bukit Munggu to develop sorghum on post-mining land.

Having successfully harvested time and time again with continous production rise thanks to the management that utilized the existing land structures, sorghum has great potential to be developed in Tanjung Enim as alternative commudity for food, feed, energy, and industrial, as well as for economical alternative in reclamating post-mining land which is quite extensive in this region.

 

On SIMANTRI Bukit Munggu land area, sorghum cultivation proved could be done with the intensification of agriculture and perennials through intercropping with weekly plants, monthly plants, and fruit plants. Here, sorghum can still grow up maximally even though it was intercropped with vegetable plants such as spinach and mustard greens, peppers, eggplants, and ginger, as well as the types of fruit plants, such as custard apples, guava, papaya, banana, and mango. 

 

After three times of harvesting, it once again made into fourth harvest since sorghum start cultivated in Simantri during the mid of 2012, a significant increase was shown in the number of fascicles in one stem sorghum plant and reach three thousand fascicles, close to the ideal number of fascicles which was 3,500 per stem.

 

Although sorghum was one of the versatile plant with a high nutritional content, this time, as a commodity it could not be enjoyed optimally yet. This is due to the selling value of sorghum which was still seen as unpotential compared to the other cereal products, such as rice, corn, wheat and beans. Sorghum utilization by farmer themselves are still constrained by the completeness of the required facilities, such as seed solver engine and other post-mining process equipments. Sorghum seeds are hard to be peeled so that the improvement of required technology is needed.