Sugar Production Remains Slow Due to Rainy Weather

Today marked day two of the new sugar cane crop season. And, as the wet weather persists, cane delivery has been rather slow, and so has milling because the mill is currently running at half capacity since the air emission tower is still being tested.  BSI/ASR’s Farmer Relations Manager, Olivia Carballo-Avilez, says that they are taking all of these outside factors into consideration when drafting an estimate for how much cane will be milled for the season.

Olivia Avilez, Cane Farmers Relations Manager, BSI/ASR: “The SCPC has made an estimate of around 1.3 million tons and a little bit more. Our perspective on that is again that every year we have an inflated sort of production estimate and again this year we think that there has been a lot of impact of flooding, stand over cane which will not yield the production estimate and we’ve also had some impact from frog hopper which one of the key pests from the industry so with all of that our estimate is around 1.15 million tons of cane but we will see. Every year it is important that we document and therefore the importance of the Sugar Industry Management Information System because once you are able to log in and put in the amount of cane that you are actually producing then there is no question about data. We urge of course the farmers and the SCPC to use the system so that we were able to appropriately estimate the cane.”  

Avilez adds that farmers play a big role in managing how the different species of cane are properly harvested in order to reduce spoilage and maximize their crop.

Olivia Avilez, Cane Farmers Relations Manager, BSI/ASR: “ If you come by Ornge Walk and you travel the road on the highway if you see all the cane with a tassel right now it has a flower, it’s flowering and that indicates it’s maturity so you can actually see where they can is mature because of the variety this is a CP variety that flowers when it’s mature and it’s coming to that right time to harvest. So yes there are varieties and for BSI we have those scheduled and each farmer makes a plan based on their varieties that they have to harvest and it’s not just the cane maturity but also the road access as well and the dates and time that they were cut so definitely some of this technical work is happening and farmers know how to do this as well and they are doing it themselves. All the harvesting group leaders know these technical aspects of harvesting cane.”