Sweet tradition resumes at Andersonville farm
Bobby Stooksbury pours this year’s first bucket of extracted sorghum cane juice into the cooker as Kyle Buckner holds the strainer on Saturday morning at the Stooksbury Sorghum Farm in Andersonville. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
Under sunny skies and, finally, some cool fall weather, Stooksbury’s nephew, Kyle Buckner, led the horse around in circles and rammed the cane stalks into the grinder to extract the sweet yellow juice from them.
The sorghum cane is grown each year on the farm, at 514 Park Lane.
Within about an hour of starting, Bucker had enough of the cane juice in the bucket to pour it into the cooker, which sits under an open hut a few feet away. There, the sorghum cane juice is boiled down into the thick syrup, which is then bottled and sold on the farm.
Stooksbury’s business partner, Alan Conrad, also makes a sorghum molasses-sweetened barbecue sauce that he bottles and sells along with the molasses from the cooking booth.
The process is open for visitors to see from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every Saturday this fall.
Pint-size jars of the sorghum molasses and sorghum barbecue sauce cost $10 each.
“We make about 100 gallons of the sorghum syrup every year here on the farm,” Stooksbury said.
It takes about three hours to make the syrup from the raw cane juice.
One acre of sorghum cane can make up to 150 gallons of the syrup, Stooksbury said.
The operation is open to the public to view.