Post harvest cane quality deterioration in sugarcane billets under mechanicalharvesting

摘要

Manual harvesting of whole stalk green cane is a widely followed practice of any sugarcane farmers in India. In spite of this practice, sucrose losses after cane harvest are enormous. The cane supply factory regulations and existing laws led to inordinate delay in crushing of harvested cane. The field loss in commercial cane sugar sometimes exceeds 1.0 unit / day during late crushing period i.e., February end to March onwards. Under present day situation of labour scarcity coupled with increased labour cost, mechanical harvesting is a must for the existence of sugarcane cultivation. For this reason, cane harvesting by chopper harvester has been introducing recently in a few sugar industry units. A study was undertaken to assess the quality loss in billets over the presently existing cane supply system. Cane quality deterioration in terms of hike in reducing sugars and decline of other juice parameters like percent sucrose, juice pH, TAI, dextran and glucose coefficient values in juice, 96 h ah wascomparatively low in sugarcane clones 2002A226, 2000A63, 2000A70, 2000A213, 2000A62 and 2000A56 when cane was harvested as whole cane. Irrespective of varieties, cane quality deterioration including cane weight loss along with juice quality parameters declines was high in billet harvesting over whole cane harvesting.