Sugarcane crop on pace to match last year’s record harvest

Last year was a record-setting harvest for sugarcane farmers in Louisiana, and this year’s harvest is thus far on pace to match that output: 226 pounds of sugar processed from each ton of stalks cut. Troy Mistretta is harvesting 43 tons of sugarcane per acre on his 2,000-acre Mistretta Farms in White Castle, with a yield of nearly 10,000 pounds of processed sugar per acre. “I call that ‘five-digit cane,’ ” says Kenneth Gravois, a sugarcane specialist with the LSU AgCenter Research & Extension. Mistretta says good rainfall this summer—including the downpour brought on by Hurricane Isaac (which also had weak “back-end” winds that left the crop standing)—is the primary reason for high-sucrose concentration in this year’s crop. However, a big harvest and high sucrose concentration has also pushed prices of harvested sugarcane down to $0.23 per pound, from an average of $0.32. And there’s no way to store unprocessed sugarcane because its fibers begin to break down after 24 hours. “It’s a volume game,” says Charles Schudmak, chief operating officer at Cora Texas Co., a raw sugar and molasses manufacturer in White Castle. As the second-largest sugarcane mill in Louisiana, Cora Texas takes in about 670 truckloads of cane and processes 4 million pounds of sugar each day. The final product is 99% sucrose, Schudmak says, before it is shipped to a refinery in Gramercy to get refined to 99.9%—which is bought on store shelves and requires no subsidies. —Adam Pearson