Sugarcane harvesting around the corner in Louisiana

In about one week from now, southern Louisiana goes through a transformation. The roads become filled with trucks loaded with cane headed to one of the twelve or so sugarcane mills remaining in Louisiana. The mills take on the look of beehives with all the trucks arriving to drop their loads of cane. Clouds of steam are churning out of smoke stacks at each of the factories from the sugarcane bagasse being burned to power the processing of cane in order to extract the sugar from the crop.


Today, a few USDA scientists from our location, including myself, had the opportunity to go to the John Deere factory in Thibodaux. This factory manufactures cane harvesters that are sent in sugarcane-growing areas all over the world. We were looking at some of their newest, most advanced harvesters, and even got to see a very interesting-looking prototype harvester that was designed to harvest a wide range of large tropical grasses over variable row conformations. It was a fun experience. I took a couple of shots of their latest "green machines," used for harvesting sugarcane. Of course, the prototype machine is still under wraps, so I wasn't allowed to take any shots of it. John Deere bought out Cameco a few years back, but kept the Cameco yellow color for a while. Now all of their cane harvesters are John Deere green, so it is easy to tell the farmers that have newer machines from the farmers that are still relying on the older Cameco-colored machines.

The machines are designed to cut the cane, chop the stalks into short sections less than a foot long, elevate the stalks from the harvester into a wagon, and leave all of the leafy trash in the field so that the mill only has to deal with the cleaned stalk sections. Here are two videos, one showing the harvest operation, the other giving you a sense of what you would experience being in the cab while the cane was being harvested.