Researchers in the University of Arizona's department of agricultural and biosystems engineering recently reaped the reward of six years of planning, testing and trials and harvested 40 acres of experimental sweet sorghum at the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Red Rock Agricultural Research Center.

Known as the sugarcane of the desert, sweet sorghum could be a sustainable and ecological future biofuel crop for Arizona -- and there will be one, said Dennis Ray, a plant geneticist in the UA's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: "There's no doubt that we're going to have biofuels in the future because no matter what, petroleum is a finite resource."