St. Martinville – The Louisiana Sugar Cane Co-Operative factory just north of St. Martinville is slightly ahead of last year’s pace for processing sugar cane at the same point in the year, LaSuCa Ag Division Manager John Hebert said Monday.
“Saturday was the 40th day of the crop, and as of that day we had processed 766,098 tons,” Hebert said. “The average daily processing rate as of that date is 19,395 tons per day.
“We’re tracking ahead of last year because while that’s our year-to-date processing rate, our sevenday average is closer to 22,000 tons per day. That 22,000 rate is hopefully going to bring our final daily average up above 20,000 tons a day by the end of the season.”
LaSuCa began taking in sugar cane for grinding on Sept. 15 with the Theoretical Recoverable Sugar value from the core sampler coming in at 207 pounds per ton on a daily basis, within one pound of last year’s crop on the same crop day.
“I would say that as far as processing, as far as sugar recovery, as far as yield per acre, everything is nearly identical to last year,” Hebert said. “Rainfall in crop, this is the third year in a row that we essentially have no recordable rainfall in the first 40 days of the season.
“Here at the mill we’ve only had, as of day 40, we’ve had 1.1 inches of recordable rainfall.”
The mill is expecting to get to about 2.2 million tons of sugar cane processed by the end of the season, which would be above 2025’s total of 2,049,800 tons processed.
