St. Martinville – Sugar cane grinding started this past Tuesday at the Louisiana Sugar Cane Cooperative factory just north of St. Martinville, and a slight bump in acreage over the nine parishes that the mill services are projected to bring a record yield this year, LaSuCa Ag Division Manager John Hebert said.
LaSuCa began taking in sugar cane for grinding on Sept. 16 with the Theoretical Recoverable Sugar value from the core sampler coming in slightly lower than expected at 200 pounds per ton on a daily basis.
“I’d hoped to be a little higher right now,” Hebert said. “I’m a little disappointed in the sugar. We’re trying to figure out why we're not doing as good as we expected but we haven’t really been able to put our thumb on it yet. It may just be Mother Nature.
“People do the same thing year in and year out and get a different result. That’s farming. We’re not quite hitting the mark like we’d expect to. But time will tell.”
The mill ground about 72,000 tons of cane the first week, he said.
Hebert said that about 1,500 more acres are being farmed this year in the parishes that the factory services, mostly in St. Landry Parish.
“We pull cane from nine different parishes,” Hebert said. “My expectation is I believe we have a very similar crop to last year, so right now I’m putting our yield projection at 33 tons of cane per acre. That’s Iberia Parish to Rapides Parish to Iberville Parish to Vermilion Parish, our entire supply area.
“Across all of our acreage that would give us about 2,050,000 tons of cane, which would be the largest crop we’ve every processed.”
The mill processed about 1,980,000 tons of cane last year, so the crop would be about 60 or 70 tons more, based on the projected yield per acre and the slightly higher acreage.
Cane
“I think this growing season was very similar to last year’s growing season,” Hebert said. “I think this year’s crop is very similar to last year’s crop.”
Hebert said LaSuCa is hoping to finish the grinding season around the end of the year or early in 2026.
“We try to finish in the first half of January, is always our goal,” he said. “I would say that this year’s startup is the best we’ve seen as far as ramping up production in this first week. We’re on target to grind more cane in the first week than we ever have in any other first week of harvest. I’m really pleased with the factory performance during the startup period.”
