In article ,
"Jim Webster" wrote:
[snip]
All I remember about sugar cane is learning as a kid that they used to
use fire to get rid of the various snakes etc living in it (when it was
all cut by hand). Your chances of getting any crop to burn in a cumbrian
autumn depend entirely on whether you were going to naphalm it or not.
No other option would come anywhere close. :-))

Actually, in north Queensland, burning cane prior to harvest was more
to do with preventing Weil's Disease than killing snakes. (The
simultaneous near eradication of death adders was seen as a bonus. ;-)
See: http://www.maps.jcu.edu.au/hist/fever/weils/weils.html

For some years now most cane has been cut green.
This has two major benefits:
(i) there is less deterioration prior to milling (a very important
consideration now that "billet harvesters" are the rule rather than
the early "whole stick" harvesters -- both machine and man . And
(ii) the consequent "trash blanket" has greatly reduced both
soil erosion following harvest and weed growth in the ratoon crops.

A more surprising result has been the enormous reduction in traction
power and consequent fuel use required for cultural practices,
especially during crop growth. One farm I know of now only uses about
a third of the fuel it used previously. The reduction has been so
great that they no longer find it useful to have on-farm bulk storage.

Of course, there have also been a few downsides of green cane
harvesting and trash blankets. One was a stem borer that turned up as
a real pest for the first time in decades. Another was the problem of
ensuring adequate N supply to the crop given the huge load of leaf and
tops tying up a lot of available N -- not to mention the
technical difficulty of applying fertiliser through several inches of
mulch!

One assumes that, given time and the build up of *soil* organic matter
as a result of the trash blankets gradually rotting down, some sort of
equilibrium may be established WRT N availability to the crop.
(Maybe this has already been shown (or not -- I'm not all that
familiar with sugar cane agronomy.)

Addendum:

From _The North Queensland Register_ of 25 Aug 1934 reporting on
Industrial Court action relating to AWU moves to mandate cane
burning to protect workers from Weil's disease [ as quoted at
http://www.maps.jcu.edu.au/hist/feve.../burncane.html ]

quoting
Mr. Fallon said there was such an outbreak of the disease that 130 of
the 800 field workers in the district had been infected and there had
been six deaths. The employees' organisation in the sugar industry had
been very concerned about the situation at Ingham, and the A.W.U.,
together with the State Government, had been doing everything
practicable to meet the situation....
/quoting

[ Mr G.C. (Clarrie) Fallon was Queensland State secretary of the
Australian Workers' Union (AWU) http://www.awu.net.au/index.html
at that time. ]


Cheers, Phred.

--
LID