Clinton Family Farms to Harvest Sorghum

Clinton Family Sorghum Farms will be in full operation beginning August 25 through Labor Day weekend. The stalks are tall, the juice is sweet and the seeds are brown. Now’s your chance to see the operation and experience the all-but-lost art of making sorghum.

This family-owned farm is operated by brothers-in-law JD Clinton and EJ Robinson. The facility was built six years ago but the mills used to squeeze the juices are each over 100 years old. The tractor that plants, plows and works during the harvest is better known as “Little Red,” EJ’s antique International Harvester tractor.

Many people visit the farm each year just to see the modern day process, because they watched and helped their families in their earlier years. Long ago, most families had their own little mill and made their own syrup just for family use.

The sorghum stalks are anywhere from 8- to 12-feet tall this year and will be topped before being cut and bundled with an antique corn binder. The canes are then picked up and loaded on trailers and carried to the mills to be ground.

The sweet, greenish juice flows through a filter and is pumped underground, uphill into holding tanks. There it settles before being pumped into the cooking pan, after being filtered again.

The cooking pan is 4 feet wide and 16 feet long and handmade of stainless steel. It contains baffles that the juice flows through as it cooks into that beautiful clear amber-colored syrup.

As the hot syrup flows from the cooking pan, it is sent through a cooling tank and another filter before being bottled into familiar “little brown jugs.”

Registered with the National Sweet Sorghum Growers and Processors of America (NSSPPA), each bottle proudly displays its seal of purity. EJ also serves as the Tennessee representative to the international association.

Clinton Family Farms grows and produces 100% pure sweet sorghum syrup. It is located on Highway 70 West about three miles south of Brownsville. Visitors are welcomed and encouraged. Come check the farm out and take a step back in time; just for a while.

Clinton Family Farms sorghum is sold in most EW James and Sons Grocers, The Old Country Store at Casey Jones Village in Jackson, Tenn., Fred Stoker and Sons catalog, or at the farm. You can also find them on the Pick Tennessee Products website. Sorghum cookbooks are also available at the farm. For more information and directions, call 731-779-0904 or 731-227-9347.