Sugar Milling Halted at Tower Hill Due to Excessive Mud in Cane Supply

The milling of sugar cane has come to a halt at Tower Hill, Orange Walk.  The decision for the stoppage comes as a result of the excessive mud being extracted from the sugar cane at the mill.  It is unclear at this point as to when milling will continue as BSI is monitoring the weather conditions that have impacted the yield at the mill.  The company had a media briefing today where William Neal, the Communications Director for BSI/ASR explained that to continue with the milling would not be financially practical.

William Neal, Communications Director, BSI/ASR: “The roads have been in very terrible condition and the fields have been in terrible conditions. This is not a good time to be harvesting because obviously the amount of mud and the difficulty that farmers have to extract their cane makes it extremely difficult. So you spend far more energy in terms of physical energy and also gas etc to actually bring cane to the factory. Once they’re at the factory, we have to really deal with more than double the amount of mud that the factory can afford to process at this juncture. So it’s really not a good time to actually continue with the cane season simply because the challenges at the farm level and at the factory level are just extraordinary. The cost in terms of what we’re spending to try and extract sugar from cane that has very poor quality at this juncture simply because the rains have been so consistent makes it you know just not viable for us to continue with the cane crop at this juncture. We have some media who’s been saying that this is the first time we’ve had a stop of this sort. No, we’ve had stops even as late as last year, right Steven?”

Stephen Usher, Industrial Operations Manager, BSI/ASR: “Oh yeah, last year when we extended the grinding season we had stops in June. So where we stopped for over a week, again due to the weather conditions. We had two stops last year where we stopped and had a pause and then restarted and after that too we decided to end the crop because we were getting deeper into the rainy season and more stops were remnant so we decided to stop the season.”
William Neal, Communications Director, BSI/ASR:  “We’ve had a couple industry meetings to actually come to this decision. So it was mutually agreed. We can’t take a unilateral decision. We try to as much as possible work with our stakeholders to ensure that this is the best way forward. But we can only reiterate that it is not economically viable for anyone, not for the farmers because of the sugar content and poor cane quality, and it’s not also economically viable for the mill. So it’s the best decision to make and to just hope for the best in terms of the improving weather conditions in the very near future.”

Stephen Usher, the Industrial Operations Manager for BSI/ASR spoke on the technical aspect of the stoppage.  He noted that the current measurements made at the factory show that the ratio of mud to cane is near ten percent which translates to ten tonnes of mud for every hundred tonnes of cane.  

Stephen Usher, Industrial Operations Manager, BSI/ASR: “The stoppage, actually that will occur today. In terms of milling, we will probably cease milling sometime this evening going into tonight. And then we normally take out the sugar out of the factory which we refer to as we liquidate. And that should go through till tomorrow, which time once that’s completed, we will shut down operations. And as William mentioned, the cold front should be passing through. Once it passes through we will reconvene a meeting with the other stakeholders in the industry and from that point we’ll have to look and see when we can restart but at this point there is no definite date of restarting or how long the pause will be. When the cane is delivered to the factory, we normally we measure the quality of cane by the purity. The purity is a function of the pulp or the sugar content inside the cane because as William had mentioned we extract the juice out of the cane to produce sugar. So the end product is sugar. So we normally measure that with a purity of 81% or higher. Recently, we have been getting purities in the mid 70s, actually as low as mid 60s. Once we get that low, that means  we get less sugar out of the cane. To give you an idea, we also measure the grinding rate, the tons cane per ton sugar. At this time, and I’ll go back to like 2023, we would be getting for every nine tons of cane we crush, we would get one ton of sugar. Right now we are averaging roughly 14 tons of cane to get one ton of sugar. So that yield is very low. It’s poor. So with those yields, it doesn’t make sense to continue grinding because then what happens is our operations costs will increase. And so basically it will be a loss on the mill side as well as farmers. So we’ll produce less sugar and that’ll be less revenue. Now the cane coming in, when you harvest under these conditions with a lot of rain, we get a lot of mud coming in. Again, we measure the mud. as a function of the amount of cane that we grind. In a normal rainy season, like in a February month, we normally for every ton of cane we grind, we would take out 5% is mud. So for example, if we grind a hundred tons, five tons of that will be mud. Currently that ratio is close to 10%. So if we grind a hundred tons of cane, we’re taking out 10 tons of mud. So it doesn’t make sense because we are taking out in some instances more mud than sugar. And what that does for us to take out the mud, we have our clarification station that can only handle a certain amount of juice to clarify. So basically the clarification station dictates the grinding rate.”

Neal noted that due to the stoppage revenues would be lost by the factory and the farmers.  As for the availability of sugar, he noted that this move is not expected to cause a scarcity.