The present article is based on a report submitted to the Ministry of Agriculture in Khartoum (Sudan) by an agricultural research officer and an inspector of agriculture and is the result of a preliminary study of the agriculture of a tribe which had been earmarked by the provincial administration for commercial production of sorghum. Most tribes of the Southern Sudan are sorghum cultivators, but none has taken to growing this staple food for sale despite the increasing demand for grain in townships. It was realized that some limitations, possibly of a social or cultural character, stood in the way of such development and therefore it seemed desirable to study the tribal customary agriculture by the methods of social anthropology, instead of approaching it only from the point of view of agronomy.