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

In article , Michael Percy wrote:
Phred wrote:

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.)

If organic matter without mixdown is accumulating in the soil profile, it
must be a very? slow process. You produce, meaning you get nitrogen down
there somehow, while building om up slowly, then om in profile must shift
towards the recalcetrend. Not worth waitng for, would be my take, find
better ways to bring in the N. If it is really the best to leave the trash.

Yeah. My thoughts too, hence the "given time". However, given that
(time), there must be some increase in soil OM as a result of trash
blankets. After all, the things usually lie around after each harvest
through several ratoons. Admittedly, most of the litter will probably
simply "evaporate" into water and CO2, but bugs and worms must achieve
something compared with life before green cane harvesting when the
whole lot was just burnt each year. (Now it's usually only burnt
before planting a new crop AFAIK.)

Sounds nice but might be more efficient to feed it to animals. Just my 2p
and I do not know a whit of sugarcane agronomy.

I was going to respond last night, but at 2 a.m. I decided it could
wait. A timely procrastination as it turned out as there was some
discussion of this issue in the news here today, concerning an aspect
I would have overlooked.

The first point is that since the days of draught animals are long
gone, most cane farms around here no longer have fences. In some
districts, and in certain particular situations (e.g. a significant
area of non-arable land [usually due to excessive slope] which was
cleared before world heritage "pristine" rainforest intervened),
there are mixed farms of cane/beef cattle. The cattle typically graze
on exotic pasture grasses, often naturalised rather than sown for the
purpose. _Panicum maximum_ and _Brachiaria_ species dominate (with a
fair admixture of the weedy blady grass (_Imperata cylindrica_) in
most cases .

The second point, which was raised today, is that cane farms were
heavily contaminated by chlorinated hydrocarbons over several decades
in the form of insecticide applied to control the larvae of the cane
beetle. With modern concern and consequent controls over potential
contamination of meat products, cane farmers don't feed crop residues
to cattle.

Given the current serious drought affecting most of eastern Australia,
there have been suggestions for using cane trash as drought feed.
However, for the reason given above, people are being very cautious
about it. Although BHC etc. have not been used now for quite a long
time, these compounds do persist in the environment for a very long
time.

So, before anyone would feel comfortable feeding cane crop residues to
stock, there would need to be some fairly careful testing of material
from individual paddocks. It may not be practical... but it will be
interesting to see how things do pan out if things get desperate.


Cheers, Phred.

--
LID

Phred wrote in message
...
The first point is that since the days of draught animals are long
gone, most cane farms around here no longer have fences. In some
districts, and in certain particular situations (e.g. a significant
area of non-arable land [usually due to excessive slope] which was
cleared before world heritage "pristine" rainforest intervened),
there are mixed farms of cane/beef cattle. The cattle typically graze
on exotic pasture grasses, often naturalised rather than sown for the
purpose. _Panicum maximum_ and _Brachiaria_ species dominate (with a
fair admixture of the weedy blady grass (_Imperata cylindrica_) in
most cases .

The second point, which was raised today, is that cane farms were
heavily contaminated by chlorinated hydrocarbons over several decades
in the form of insecticide applied to control the larvae of the cane
beetle. With modern concern and consequent controls over potential
contamination of meat products, cane farmers don't feed crop residues
to cattle.

Given the current serious drought affecting most of eastern Australia,
there have been suggestions for using cane trash as drought feed.
However, for the reason given above, people are being very cautious
about it. Although BHC etc. have not been used now for quite a long
time, these compounds do persist in the environment for a very long
time.

So, before anyone would feel comfortable feeding cane crop residues to
stock, there would need to be some fairly careful testing of material
from individual paddocks. It may not be practical... but it will be
interesting to see how things do pan out if things get desperate.


Cheers, Phred.

while not suffering from the same contamination problems, sugar beet
tops are often cut and ensiled as a cattle feed in the UK. Indeed with
beet virtually all the crop is sold for animal feed after the sugar has
been extracted.


--
Jim Webster

"The pasture of stupidity is unwholesome to mankind"

'Abd-ar-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Khaldun al-Hadrami'

Xref: 127.0.0.1 sci.agricultu59228


"Phred" wrote in message
...
In article , Michael Percy
wrote:
Phred wrote:

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.)

If organic matter without mixdown is accumulating in the soil profile, it
must be a very? slow process. You produce, meaning you get nitrogen down
there somehow, while building om up slowly, then om in profile must
shift
towards the recalcetrend. Not worth waitng for, would be my take, find
better ways to bring in the N. If it is really the best to leave the
trash.

Yeah. My thoughts too, hence the "given time". However, given that
(time), there must be some increase in soil OM as a result of trash
blankets. After all, the things usually lie around after each harvest
through several ratoons. Admittedly, most of the litter will probably
simply "evaporate" into water and CO2, but bugs and worms must achieve
something compared with life before green cane harvesting when the
whole lot was just burnt each year. (Now it's usually only burnt
before planting a new crop AFAIK.)

Sounds nice but might be more efficient to feed it to animals. Just my 2p
and I do not know a whit of sugarcane agronomy.

I was going to respond last night, but at 2 a.m. I decided it could
wait. A timely procrastination as it turned out as there was some
discussion of this issue in the news here today, concerning an aspect
I would have overlooked.

The first point is that since the days of draught animals are long
gone, most cane farms around here no longer have fences. In some
districts, and in certain particular situations (e.g. a significant
area of non-arable land [usually due to excessive slope] which was
cleared before world heritage "pristine" rainforest intervened),
there are mixed farms of cane/beef cattle. The cattle typically graze
on exotic pasture grasses, often naturalised rather than sown for the
purpose. _Panicum maximum_ and _Brachiaria_ species dominate (with a
fair admixture of the weedy blady grass (_Imperata cylindrica_) in
most cases .

The second point, which was raised today, is that cane farms were
heavily contaminated by chlorinated hydrocarbons over several decades
in the form of insecticide applied to control the larvae of the cane
beetle. With modern concern and consequent controls over potential
contamination of meat products, cane farmers don't feed crop residues
to cattle.

Given the current serious drought affecting most of eastern Australia,
there have been suggestions for using cane trash as drought feed.
However, for the reason given above, people are being very cautious
about it. Although BHC etc. have not been used now for quite a long
time, these compounds do persist in the environment for a very long
time.

So, before anyone would feel comfortable feeding cane crop residues to
stock, there would need to be some fairly careful testing of material
from individual paddocks. It may not be practical... but it will be
interesting to see how things do pan out if things get desperate.

You also have to be careful about feeding cane because of prussic acid
(cyanide) at certain times in its growth cycle.

As I recall the digestibility of the residue is pretty low making hardly
worth the hauling. A great many schemes in using ag waste are not feasible
because they won't pay the fuel and expenses to gather and hall the low
energy product. Such as the case of gasification of corn stalks where in the
case of sugar cane residue where it is aready gatherer up it may be
practical. Or in the case of swine manure it is already concentrated and you
have to processes it and you need heat a methane generator may make good
economic sense. It makes methane. It reduces the volume of the wastes and
preserves the nitrogen and phosphate and keeps down the smell.
--
Gordon

Gordon Couger
Stillwater, OK
www.couger.com/gcouger