Pushing On With A Long Crush

By Kevin Borg, Chairman, CANEGROWERS Mackay

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It is becoming clear that despite the long harvest season, there will be standover cane adding to this year’s losses in sugar content and to the high cost of production. It’s been a double-edged sabre, as growers grapple with mill performance issues and a few unseasonal rain events.

Plane Creek Mill is expecting to cut out by December 31, and Mackay Sugar is estimating an extraordinary January 13 for the end of harvest. A long harvest serves neither miller nor grower well, with sugar content (CCS) usually dwindling after mid-November. That CCS is already declining in some areas with the storm season underway.

High temperatures and frequent rain bring on the plant’s seasonal transition, causing suckering and degraded quality, driving sugar content down. When it hits a low sugar content of 7, The grower ceases to make a profit. In Mackay, there is no return, in Plane Creek, there is a payment to cover basic harvest costs.

Adding insult to injury, the grower is left with the cost of growing the next crop on that land while experiencing impacted cash flow.

Given issues with mill performance, there is a strong perception among growers - and the Mackay Area Committee acting as bargaining agent for CANEGROWERS members - that Mackay Sugar should take example from other millers, understand the position of grower families, and act to financially support growers impacted by low CCS as the season wears on some two months longer than is agronomically practical.

As for the grower with crop left in the paddock, the losses are further increased and push into the following year with the major risk that is standover cane.

Standover cane is old, or dead. It is paddocks that cannot be ratooned with fresh growth for the following harvest, but instead aged into fibrous, tangled, hard-to-harvest and mill cane. Nor can that paddock be put to fallow if that is where it sits in its cropping cycle, that pause time where the soil can rest and re-generate with legume or mixed species planting. Standover throws farm planning out the window and it can take years to restore proper crop rotation.

With added season length, labour costs get blown out and inflate cost-of-production, the mill maintenance season shrinks, imperilling milling performance in the following harvest.

With high sugar prices, and a bumper crop in the ground this should be a harvest for the ages. The estimated crop for Mackay is 5.6 million tonnes, and 1.5 million for Plane Creek District. Prices have tipped the $640. However, the season has been dogged by wet weather, particularly in Plane Creek district, and ongoing mill breakdowns and stoppages in the north, particularly at Farleigh Mill.

Mackay Sugar has crushed 60 per cent of the crop as at October 30, and Plane Creek has now crossed the one million tonne mark and nearing 70 per cent.

There is a lot of money being lost for growers with standover cane and low CCS because of poor milling performance and long season length. The situation is causing anxiety among growers as they strive to meet the necessary percentage of their crop harvested to fulfil forward pricing commitments, make finance repayments and maintain profitability.

The Bureau of Meteorology is predicting an early onset of the wet, and above average rainfall when it comes. We have certainly experienced a solid start to the storm season in the past few weeks. There’s a high risk the monsoon will set in, putting an untimely end to the 2022 harvest.

It is upon us - the growers and the harvest contractors - to make the most of what time we have remaining to get our crop away: weather, bin and mill availability willing.

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The onset of the wet brings about a seasonal change in sugar cane. Pictures: Contributed