Sugarcane

A cane stalk is a jointed stem of alternating nodes and internodes, made of fibre and juice. The mill wants the juice, and specifically the sucrose dissolved in it; the fibre is what it must break open to get at the juice, and what leaves the crushing train as bagasse. Cane arriving at the factory is therefore assessed on two things: how much of it there is, and how much sucrose it carries.

Harvest form varies and matters. Cane may be cut green or burnt beforehand to remove leaf trash; it may arrive as whole stalks from manual cutting or as short billets from a mechanical harvester. These are not cosmetic differences — burning and billeting both open the stalk to deterioration, so the harvest method changes how fast the delivery must be crushed.

Millable cane

The portion of the stalk worth sending to the crusher, once tops and most trash are removed.

Extraneous matter (trash)

Leaves, tops, roots, and soil delivered with the cane. It adds weight without sucrose and is penalised in cane payment.

Billeted cane

Cane chopped into short lengths by a mechanical harvester. Every cut is a wound, so billets deteriorate faster than whole stalks.

A cut stalk remains biologically active and is now colonised. Respiration continues, consuming sugars; sucrose is inverted into simpler sugars that a factory cannot crystallise; and micro-organisms enter through cut ends and damaged tissue and degrade sucrose further, generating gums that foul the process downstream. None of this is visible from outside — a stalk can look perfectly sound while the sucrose the mill is paying for has already gone.

Losses are faster in burnt cane and faster again in billets, and faster in heat than in cool weather. The industry’s response is the delay from cut to crush, managed as one of the central operating metrics of any cane supply. Harvesting is scheduled against mill capacity, transport is organised to keep the crusher fed without a queue of waiting cane, and delays from weather, breakdowns, or mill stoppages are treated as losses of product rather than mere inconvenience. There is no store, no bin, and no drying step that reverses any of this.

Cane payment systems exist because weight alone is a poor description of what a grower has delivered. A tonne of cane may carry a lot of sucrose or little, and the difference is worth more than the tonnage. Sampling and analysis at the mill therefore establish the sugar content of each delivery, and payment combines weight with that measured quality — which is why cane is one of the few commodities whose value to the buyer is determined analytically at intake rather than by a visual grade.

• Sucrose content of the delivered cane
• Purity of the juice, and the proportion of sugars that cannot be crystallised
• Fibre content, which affects crushing and bagasse output
• Extraneous matter — tops, leaves, soil, and roots
• Deterioration since cutting, including damage and microbial degradation

Payment formulae are contractual and regional, and they differ substantially between cane industries. They are not published here: what is general is the principle that cane is paid on weight and quality together, with deductions for the matter that arrived alongside the cane rather than as cane.

Crushing a cane delivery produces several streams at once, and their relationship is the clearest illustration of the primary-product, co-product, and by-product distinction in this reference. Raw sugar is the intended output — the reason the mill exists. Molasses is the mother liquor left when no further sugar can economically be crystallised from it: a deliberate, valuable, simultaneous output with established feed, fermentation, and distilling markets, and so a co-product rather than waste. Bagasse is the crushed fibre residue, low in value per tonne but produced in large volume and burnt to run the factory itself.

A large share of cane in some industries goes not to sugar at all but to ethanol, fermented either from juice directly or from molasses. Cane is thus simultaneously a food commodity, an energy feedstock, and — through bagasse — the fuel for its own processing, which is unusual among agricultural commodities.

Sugarcane is grown in enormous quantity and hardly traded at all across borders. The stalk is bulky and heavy relative to the sucrose it carries, and it is deteriorating throughout any journey — so shipping cane makes no commercial sense when the sugar can be extracted at origin and shipped instead. Cane supply areas are consequently drawn around mills, not around ports.

What this means for anyone reading trade data is that the internationally traded sugar commodity is raw sugar, not cane. Figures reported for "sugar" trade describe the product; figures for cane describe production and describe deliveries into local mills.