How to grow sugarcane

Clear the field of weeds, old cane clumps (the leftover "stools") and loose trash, so nothing competes with your young cane or hides pests.

Rip or plough deep — about knee-deep (30–45 cm) — so the roots can drive right down and heavy rain drains away instead of drowning the setts.

Break up the clods and level the field. On a slope, work across the slope, not up and down, and run your furrows along the contour so storm water soaks in instead of washing your soil away.

Open your planting furrows a bit more than one big stride apart (1.2–1.5 m between rows) — wide rows give you room to weed, feed, water and cut this tall, heavy crop for years to come.

Take seed cane from a young, healthy, vigorous block, about 6–9 months old. Pick even, well-grown stools (the clumps a cane plant grows in) and reject any that are thin, grassy, stunted, or carry black whips or yellow-mottled leaves.

Cut the cane into setts — short pieces with about 3 buds ("eyes") each. Handle them gently so the buds are not knocked off — a knocked-off bud is a shoot you will never get.

Give the setts a hot-water bath: about 50 °C for 2 hours (or 50 °C for about 30 minutes if smut is your main worry). This gentle cooking kills the ratoon-stunting bacteria and smut hiding deep inside the cutting.

Keep the water steady-warm — hot like a comfortable hand-wash, not boiling. Too hot cooks the buds dead; too cool leaves the disease alive. With no thermometer, err on the cooler side — you can always retreat, but you cannot un-cook a dead bud.

Sterilise your cutting knife between stools — dip the blade in strong disinfectant or pass it through a flame. A dirty knife carries ratoon-stunting disease from plant to plant more surely than anything else in the field.

Plant into moist soil. Open your furrows a bit more than a stride apart (1.2–1.5 m between rows) — the same wide spacing you ripped for.

Lay the 3-bud setts end-to-end along the bottom of the furrow, in one continuous line, overlapping the ends a little. This unbroken chain gives you an even, gap-free row of shoots.

Lay them flat with the buds pointing out to the sides (not straight up or down), so every eye can push out its own shoot.

Cover with about two finger-joints of soil (5–10 cm) — shallower in heavy, wet soil; a little deeper in light, sandy, dry soil.

Water in lightly to start an even sprouting. The first shoots push up in about 1–3 weeks.

Once a week, walk the whole field in a big "W" so you cover the corners and the middle, not just the edge by the path.

Check the sprouting: are shoots coming up evenly along the furrows? Mark the blank stretches so you can gap-fill them while the crop is still young.

Termites: look for setts eaten hollow, shoots that wilt and die in patches, and thin sheets or lines of dried mud plastered over the stalk base and stubble. Scratch up a failed sett — if it is eaten out and empty, or you find pale workers in the soil at its base, termites are at work. They hit hardest in hot, dry spells.

Young-shoot "dead heart": look for a central shoot that has gone dead and dry while the outer leaves stay green — tug it and it slides out easily, often with a rotten smell. That is a young stalk borer that has killed the growing point; look for small bore holes and sawdust-like droppings (frass) near the base.

Note where the trouble is and how much of it there is. Small patches you fix by gap-filling; spreading termite damage in a dry spell is your cue to act — ask your extension officer about treating the setts or the soil.

Walk the rows 2–6 weeks after planting and find the blank stretches where no shoots came up.

Fill them by planting fresh 3-bud setts into the gaps — or lift a clump of extra shoots with a ball of soil, in the cool of the evening, drop it in, and water it well.

Water lightly and often enough to keep the topsoil moist — steady damp brings on an even flush of shoots and helps the gap-fills catch up.

Do it early: gap-fills planted now can still catch the main crop; started late, they stay small and shaded and never catch up.

Walk the field in a "W" once a week, looking hard at the growing tops and the youngest leaves.

Smut: look for a long, curved, black, whip-like growth pushing out of the top of a shoot, like a black horse-tail — often on thin, grassy, spindly stools. That black dust is millions of spores.

When you find a whip, do not shake or slash it. Slip a bag or cloth over it first, cut the whole shoot off low, and carry it right out of the field to burn or bury — never leave it lying between the rows.

Mosaic: look on the young leaves near their base for a pattern of pale-green and yellow-green patches or stripes mixed with normal green (a "mosaic" of light and dark), sometimes with narrowed leaves and stunting.

Rogue (pull out and remove) badly diseased stools, and plan to plant clean, hot-water-treated setts next season — that, not spraying, is the real cure.

Start weeding early, while the weeds are still small and the cane rows have not yet closed over.

Hoe shallowly between and along the rows — deep hoeing close to the stools cuts the cane's own feeding roots.

Weed again every 3–4 weeks until the cane canopy closes over and shades the ground itself — that shade then does the weeding for you.

Time a weeding just before you feed fertiliser, so the nitrogen goes into the cane and not into a fresh flush of weeds.

In dry areas, leave the pulled weeds lying between the rows as a mulch to hold soil moisture.

Feed once the crop is tillering well — throwing up its clumps of side-shoots. Your recommendation gives the amount for your field.

Use a compound fertiliser carrying both nitrogen (N) and potassium (K) — an NPK blend.

Band it in a line about a hand-span (20 cm) to the side of the row, not on top of the shoots, then cover it or water it in so the nitrogen soaks down instead of gassing off into the air.

Water after feeding, and keep watering. Tillering is one of the two thirstiest windows of the whole crop (grand growth is the other), so don't let the young cane go dry now — dry soil locks up the fertiliser and starves off the tillers, and every tiller lost here is a stalk you never cut.

Safety: keep fertiliser off wet leaves (it sticks and scorches them), away from food, water and children, and wash your hands after.

Every 4 weeks or so, walk the field and check stalks right across the block, not just along the edges.

Look for: small bore holes in the stalk, reddish-brown, sawdust-like droppings (frass) spilling from the holes or tucked into the leaf sheaths, and dead, dry central tops ("dead hearts") on the younger shoots.

Split open a damaged stalk: red-stained tunnels running through the internodes, often with a pinkish caterpillar inside, confirm borer.

Count the damage: on a sample of stalks, work out the share of internodes that are bored. Act when about 2 in every 100 internodes (2%) are bored — tall, over-mature cane carries the most borer, so don't leave ripe cane standing too long.

Also watch for white grubs while you are in the field: patches of cane that yellow, wilt and pull up easily with chewed roots. Dig down about 20–30 cm — a hand-span or a little more — at the base and you may find fat, white, C-shaped grubs eating the roots.

Where borer is over threshold, cut out and destroy the worst-bored stalks, clear the trashy weeds where the moths shelter and lay their eggs, and ask your extension officer about releasing parasitic wasps rather than trying to spray larvae you cannot reach.

Feed right through the grand-growth stage, splitting the fertiliser into more than one round rather than dumping it all at once. Your recommendation gives the amount and the rounds for your field.

Use a nitrogen-and-potassium compound (NPK): nitrogen to push the stalks up, potassium for strong stems and sugar.

Band it about a hand-span (20 cm) to the side of the row and cover it or water it in, so heavy rain or irrigation doesn't wash the nitrogen straight past the roots.

Water hard and regularly — this is the thirstiest stage of the whole crop. Never let the cane wilt now. If a dry spell forces you to choose, watering here beats watering at any other stage.

Safety: keep fertiliser off wet leaves, away from food, water and children, and wash your hands after.

Once the canopy has closed and the lower leaves have gone dry and brown, strip these dead leaves off the lower stalk by hand.

Leave the green top leaves alone — those are still feeding the plant and building your sugar.

Lay the stripped trash between the rows as a mulch — it holds soil moisture and smothers weeds.

Don't overdo it: a light strip of only the dead lower leaves is enough.

In the last couple of months before cutting, cut back the irrigation, then stop it — let the crop dry down.

Stop all nitrogen now. Late nitrogen keeps the cane green and watery instead of sweet.

Cool, dry weather in this window helps most — it naturally checks the growth and ripens the cane, so time your dry-down for it if you can.

Watch the crop: the lower leaves yellowing and the stalk firming up are the signs the ripening is working (see the maturity check).

From about 12 months, test a few stalks from different parts of the field.

Feel: the lower and middle sections of the stalk should be hard and woody, and the lower leaves should be yellowing and drying — signs growth has stopped and sugar has moved in.

Taste: cut a lower section and suck or chew the juice — ripe cane tastes very sweet right at the bottom of the stalk, not watery. (In sugar terms this is a Brix of about 18–20% — "Brix" just means how much sugar is dissolved in the juice; watery, half-ripe cane is well below this.)

The base ripens and sweetens first. When the bottom, middle and top all taste evenly sweet, the whole stalk is ripe.

If it passes → the cane is ripe. Move to cutting and get it straight to the mill.

If it fails (still soft, watery, or not sweet at the base) → wait, keep the dry-down going, and re-test in a couple of weeks before you cut.

Cut each stalk right down at ground level with a sharp cane knife or machete — the bottom of the stalk holds the most sugar, and cutting low leaves good buds in the stubble for the ratoon.

Strip off the leaves and cut off the green, low-sugar top. You can either burn the standing field just before cutting ("burnt cane", which clears the leaves and chases out snakes) or cut it green — either way, top and de-leaf each stalk.

Bundle the cut cane and get it to the mill within 24–48 hours. The sugar (sucrose) inverts and drains away fast once the stalk is cut, so every extra day standing in the heat is lost sugar and lost money.

No mill nearby? Keep the cut cane shaded and cool to slow the loss, and crush and boil the juice down into jaggery (solid brown sugar) yourself rather than let it sit and spoil.

Within a few weeks of harvest, walk the rows and cut any high, ragged stumps down flush to the ground with a sharp knife — high stubble sprouts weak, and its buds sit exposed to sun and pests.

Where the soil is cool or wet, rake the trash off the rows so the sun can warm the stubble and the new shoots come away evenly.

Where the soil is hot and dry, do the opposite — leave a blanket of trash over the rows to hold moisture and hold down weeds.

Fill any stools that have died out with fresh hot-water-treated setts, so the ratoon starts as a full stand.

Feed soon after harvest, as the ratoon starts back into growth. Your recommendation gives the amount for your field.

Use a nitrogen-and-potassium compound (NPK): nitrogen to push the new shoots, potassium for strong stalks and sugar.

Band it about a hand-span (20 cm) to the side of the row along the stubble and cover it or water it in, so it soaks down to the roots instead of gassing off.

Water it in and keep the ratoon moist — the regrowth stage is thirsty, and fertiliser on dry soil is wasted.

Repeat this feed at the start of each ratoon year, for the 2–4 ratoons you take before replanting.

Safety: keep fertiliser off wet leaves, away from food, water and children, and wash your hands after.