What have you been up to?
Celebrating the Chinese New Year and Lantern Festival. It is happiness to get together with friends and family.
I believe that after the difficult year of 2022, 2023 will be lucky. Spring rains are a good start.
What’s hard about 2022? Ah, where should I begin?
First, of course, is my cane land. How difficult it is for sugarcane farmers this year. In some fields, income from selling sugarcane is barely enough to cover the harvest cost, not to mention skyrocketing agricultural inputs. Even Po could not help asking: does this dried sugar cane need to be harvested?
The harvest of sugar cane before the Spring Festival is also bumpy. China lifted COVID-19 controls in November 2022, and the virus began to spread rapidly. Most of the people who cut sugarcane went COVID positive. Before the Spring Festival, only five remained COVID negative, challenging the progress of the sugarcane harvest.
The plots that were originally planned to be harvested by hand have to be harvested by machine. Therefore, the area of machine harvest this year will be more than 2000 mu (133 ha).
It takes four people, two harvesters and nine hours to harvest 62 mu (4.13 ha) of sugarcane. It is then transferred to sugar mills. The average fuel consumption per tonne of cane is about 2.53 litres, which is about the same as in previous years, but this year the cane growth is very bad… Is there little correlation between sugar cane yields and fuel consumption per unit harvested?
Every cloud has a silver lining. I can still be proud of some cane land. This is the fourth crop of sugarcane in this field. We have been harvesting by machine. I plan to keep the ratoons of sugarcane next year. Just to mention, this field does well because it has plenty of irrigation.
An Achievement You’re Proud Of?
What I am most proud of is that in the past six years, we have dug out five hills, filled in nearly 100 ponds, puddles and more than 300 mu of marsh…
This year we transformed a “Z” shaped pond, covering an area of more than two mu. The road around the pond and overgrown weeds also occupied arable land, what a waste! We filled the pond with rocky soil first and spread 30cm of black soil on the surface of the field.
It becomes a good piece of land now and suitable for machinery operation!
Next Step?
The cane has been harvested and the cane fields have been cleared.
We are going to prepare the land and maintain the farm machinery ready for farming.
The proverb says that the spring rain, spring rain, until Tomb-Sweeping Day. I hope this year’s spring rain lets sugarcane drink fully and thrive!
