Bioenergy research. Field cultivated with sweet sorghum plants. It is part of a project aimed at creating more resistant varieties of sweet sorghum for bioenergy purposes. These include the manufacture of ethanol from the sugars extracted from the plants and the production of environmentally friendly biofuels such as gas and oil from the bagasse (dry pulp). Sweet sorghum, Sorghum vulgar, is the most extensively cultivated crop in the world and the fourth most important cereal. It is annual plant with a high photosynthetic efficiency and a high nitrogen and water use efficiency. The project is funded by the Commission of European Communities.