1. Purpose

The purpose of this Member Update is to provide GTA Members guidance from the GTA Trading Standards Technical Committee regarding the assessment of Sprouted Sorghum grain.

2. Background

The GTA Trading Standards Committee is responsible for the development and ongoing review of the GTA Trading Standards and in conjunction with industry, quality assurance protocols across the grain value chain.

GTA and its Trading Standards Committee has been dealing with reports of difficulty and some inconsistency with the assessment of Sorghum during a wet Queensland harvest. The nature of the harvest has created issues with sprouted grain.

The reported assessment issues include:

• Sorghum is a small, dark spherical grain that when impacted by rain prior to harvest may lead to the seed visually sprouting.
• Harvesting and handling can knock this sprout off creating problems in determining visually if a sorghum seed has sprouted.

3. Guidance to assessors

Trading Standards Committee members advice is the key for grain assessors is to look for scalloped grain as it indicates the grain has sprouted and the sprout has been knocked off.

The assessment for sprouted and scalloped grain is done visually by trained samplers using the accepted definition and visual photographs developed by the GTA Trading Standards Committee and accepted by industry. As it is a subjective test there will be some inherent variances such as:

• between samplers
• sampler – impacted by stress and tiredness

While industry adopts the GTA Trading Standards, the Committee produced definition and photo (figure1.), it is a subjective test, and GTA cannot dictate to industry how to interpret and implement the Standard, therefore variations can exist.

It is important to note that sprouted and scalloped grain are inferior to sound grain and is not suitable for many markets uses.

It has been recorded that some of the highly sprouted sorghum this season still maintains a good test weight, making it suitable for various stockfeed uses despite containing high levels of sprouted grain. Each end-user determines the suitability of the grain for their own purposes when outside of the GTA Trading Standards.

For this current sorghum harvest, the Trading Standards Committee agreed there should be clarification provided to industry to advise that the intention of the Trading Standards (and associated visual images in the Visual Recognition Standards Guide) is that scalloped Sorghum is not ‘sound’ as it has resulted from sprouted grain having the sprout removed.

The Trading Standards Committee also agreed to seek more accurate photos of sprouted and scalloped Sorghum for the Visual Recognition Standards Guide and release this industry communication to clarify the interpretation of scalloped Sorghum.

A new version of the VRSG for 2024/25 will be released to clarify the above and make changes where the VRSG Sub-Committee has recommended.

Weather damaged but still sound Sorghum

Sprouted Sorghum

Scalloped Sorghum

Figure 1. GTA Trading Standards Definition and Photo

4. Feedback

• Industry feedback to the GTA Trading Standards Committee is welcomed on this matter and should be forwarded to submissions@graintrade.org.au