Maasdam's Sorghum and raising cane
The other day I had a pleasant conversation with Marge Maasdam Kramer, who is 70 years old but confided that she and her husband still get out and raise a lot of cane.
They raised cane last summer, the summer before, and before.
Marge, in fact, can’t remember a time when raising cane wasn’t part of her life.
I called Marge because that morning I’d had a buckwheat pancake covered with a healthy jolt of Iowa-produced Maasdam’s sorghum—which is about the only way I can handle buckwheat—and wondered how much sorghum Mr. Maasdam was making these days.
Turns out none, as he went to his reward a number of years ago. The family, however, carries on.
How is their sorghum made?
The same way, using some of the same equipment, as when Leonard J. Maasdam started selling sorghum in 1926.
Marge, his daughter, was born in 1940. She went to work in the jar-filling room, she said, as soon as she was old enough to know which side of the label went up.
On the Kramer farm in Jasper County from 50-100 acres are set aside each year for cane.
The stalks, reaching 12-14 feet in height, are generally harvested in early September. The grain is saved for seed; the stalk squeezed for the juice. Harvested with a chopper, the cane is fed into a mill powered by a steam engine.
The old way, of course, was to use a horse or mule walking in circles to turn the press, but Leonard Maasdam went modern when he bought a used 1900 model steam engine manufactured by the Atlas Engine Works.
“It’s really pleasant,” Marge told me, “to see and hear that old steam engine run. It hums along as smoothly today as it did a hundred years ago.”
The engine is fired, in part, by spent cane after the liquid has been pressed out. The cane juice is then simmered, evaporating excess water. Eight to 10 gallons of juice boils down to one gallon of syrup.
An acre of cane is capable of producing as much as 300 gallons of syrup, but 150 gallons is closer to average.
The Maasdam operation turns out as much as 12,000 gallons each year. While most sales in Iowa are through Hy-Vee and Fareway food stores, Maasdam also has outlets in Wisconsin, Missouri and Arkansas. Marge noted that an increasing percentage of sales are on the internet, including customers on both coasts.
Although a family operation—Marge & husband along with a son and daughter-in-law and one nephew comprise the corporation—they typically produce more sorghum each year than any other mill in the nation.
I found it a little surprising that sorghum sales are what they are.
While right up there with honey and maple syrup as the sweetener of choice during much of the 19th century, sorghum use declined to the point that by 1975 the U.S. Agriculture census found that in the entire country only a couple of thousand acres were planted to sweet cane.
The rebound, though modest, has been spurred by those seeking natural or organic options.
Sorghum also contains things that are good for the body. Cheryl Foreberg, R.D., has written a book entitled “Stop-the-Clock Cooking.” She makes the claim that antioxidants slow the aging process, and cites sorghum as a good source.
I’m skeptical about health benefits and organic doesn’t excite me. But on the other hand Marge uses it and she’s still raising cane.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.