The American Sugar Cane League predicts the 2016 cane crop in Louisiana shows good potential and could pass the 1.4 million tons of raw sugar produced last year, The Associated Press reports.
As the prime sugarcane growing season begins, Senior Agronomist Herman Waguespack says farmers from central and across south Louisiana are reporting good spring stands of sugar cane despite the abnormally wet winter of 2015.
“It was feared the rutted fields created by the 2015 wet harvest conditions would damage cane roots but milder weather allowed farmers to get into the fields to drain water and repair rows,” Waguespack says.
The ruts appear to have had less impact in stubble fields than anticipated, he says. Stubble is the term cane farmers use to describe the regrowth from the roots of sugarcane stalks that had been previously planted.
“Since sugarcane is a grass and will continue to grow just like a lawn, farmers can often get three or four years’ worth of crops from one planting depending on how vigorously the stubble regrows after the cane has been harvested,” Waguespack says.
The majority of acreage planted last season looks exceptionally good for this time of the year, he adds. Cane farmers are now in the process of fertilizing the crop. The recent April downpours kept growers out of the fields and put them behind in their field work, Waguespack says.
In 2015, Louisiana’s sugar cane farmers harvested more than 380,000 acres of cane which produced 1.4 million tons of raw sugar. The economic impact of the crop was $2 billion.
