Seeds of Resilience

Doctoral student Alondra Cruz is trying to help struggling ag producers.

By Texas Tech University

March 10^th, 2025

It’s a warm September morning, and Alondra Cruz is gathering her tools: shears, gloves, sun hat, paper bags, clipboard, tissue puncher, Sharpie and an ice chest for samples. She is about to hand-harvest sample plots of sorghum.

Alondra is a doctoral student in Texas Tech University’s Department of Plant & Soil Science. She is studying sorghum as a potential alternative forage for cattle. Traditional forages in the cattle industry use more water-intensive crops like corn. The sorghum she is researching, though, requires little – if any – water input, allowing growers to be more judicious with limited resources.

Alondra enrolled in a master’s program at Zamorano University in Honduras – where she first encountered sorghum. Specifically, she saw it being used as feed for cattle. To Alondra, who was studying integrated crop and livestock systems, it seemed like an easy way to help her work connect to those who needed it.

“In Honduras, sorghum is very popular among livestock producers,” she notes. “So, it made sense to use it in my research since it would make my topic more applicable for producers in the region.”

Originally an African grain crop, sorghum is used by ranchers in Honduras because of its hardiness, especially during drier seasons, and its flexibility; it is easily preserved as silage for winter feed. This made the plant ideal for ranchers in areas with minimal water and hard-to-predict weather patterns.

Alondra’s master’s degree required an internship, so she applied through the Texas Coalition for Sustainable Integrated Systems Research Program and the Texas Alliance for Water Conservation. It was her experience with sorghum that piqued the interest of Krishna Jagadish, the Coalition’s director as well as a TAWC coordinator and professor in Texas Tech’s Davis College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources.

“When I was interviewed by Dr. Jagadish, he was really interested in the fact that I had experience working with sorghum,” Alondra recalls. “He had an opportunity to continue working with forage sorghum here at Texas Tech, and that made me really happy because it is a crop I was familiar with.”

That internship grew into Alondra’s enrollment in a doctoral program at Texas Tech. Now, working with Jagadish, she’s researching sorghum for use in the livestock industry as a drought-tolerant forage.

Alondra is trying to understand how nutrient-dense sorghum is and if it is safe for cattle. She acknowledges the current lack of research around sorghum for use in the cattle industry. She sees the potential in it, though, for a variety of ranchers, and she hopes this research is a step toward increasing its use.

“Where I come from, there are the same concerns of producing with limited water and nutrient resources, but the reality of agricultural and livestock production in Central America is very different to that of the U.S.,” she says. “There are not many policies and insurances currently in place that can help producers if their crop or livestock production fails. For many producers, their production is not even for selling to others; it’s more subsistence agriculture – growing and producing food for themselves, and then, if there is leftover, they might sell to get a small profit. So, this is an even more delicate topic because it potentially means not even having food for themselves.”

Thus, at its heart, her research is really about helping feed the world.

“I think at the end of the day, that’s why we’re studying agriculture,” she said. “We’re studying this because we need to realize that we need to adapt to our changing climate and the different things that are going on. We’re not going to be able to feed the world if we keep producing the same way.”