AgCenter Experts Surveying Hurricane Damage To Sugarcane, Soybeans

OLIVIA MCCLURE

VACHERIE, LOUISIANA

 Sugarcane growers in south Louisiana were making preparations for the upcoming harvest season when Hurricane Francine came ashore last week, bringing winds that knocked their crop over and heavy rains that flooded fields that were already saturated from recent rainfall.

Now, farmers in several parishes of Louisiana’s cane belt are waiting for things to dry out and for the crop to stand itself back up. With a few days of sunny weather in the forecast, they’re optimistic they will soon be back on track.

“What we need is sunshine,” said LSU AgCenter sugarcane specialist Kenneth Gravois. “We need a good north wind to knock the water levels down. And the sunshine will allow these tops to curve back up and start reaching for the sky.”

Gravois and others at the AgCenter are in the early stages of assessing Francine’s damage to agriculture. The cane crop was a healthy one prior to the storm, he said, which bodes well for its recovery.

“I don’t see a lot of leaf shredding, which is a good sign,” he said. 

Instead, he has mostly seen lodging, an industry term that refers to plants that have been blown over by wind. Some degree of lodging happens nearly every growing season, and sugarcane can usually upright itself to a degree within a week or so. 

Outside of crop damage, the biggest problem growers are facing is flooding. The hurricane dumped several inches of rain on parishes in the cane belt and points south. Because the water levels are high throughout the area, there’s nowhere for fields to drain.

“There’s a lot of water in the backs of places where growers can’t even begin to pump off yet,” Gravois said. “The water level has to go down a little bit before you can even consider turning the pumps on.”

Between the lodging and the floodwaters, farmers are waiting for conditions to improve so they can get in their fields to apply ripener to get the crop ready for harvest. The ripener slows the plant’s growth, allowing it to concentrate its energy on sugar production.

As long as growers can resume ripener applications soon, Gravois doesn’t expect a major negative impact on the crop, even though the recovery process may result in lower tonnage — or less plant material — at harvest.

“When this crop is trying to erect itself and those tops start turning back up, it kind of pauses the maturation process,” Gravois said. “We have the tonnage from the previous growth. We’re going to miss out on a little bit of tonnage because of that timeout in growth, but right now, we want to put sugar in the crop and not a lot of tons.”

 Most farmers had finished planting next year’s crop by the time Francine rolled into Louisiana. A few acres still need to be planted, Gravois said.

“People were waiting for a bean crop to come off,” he said, referring to the soybeans that are commonly grown as a rotation crop on sugarcane farms. “It seems like the bean crop is toast at this point, probably almost a complete loss.”

Statewide, 40% to 50% of Louisiana’s soybean crop had been harvested before the hurricane. Another 20% to 30% is at or near maturity, with some of those acres located in the sugarcane-growing region.

“We’re likely to get some seed damage there,” said AgCenter soybean specialist David Moseley. “We could also get some lodging, and that will make it a little bit harder to harvest.”

Rainfall can make mature soybean seeds swell, sprout, mold or turn brown — problems that had already arisen in some places because of heavy rains in late August and early September. For later-planted beans that are still actively growing, the seeds are safe, as their composition is about 70% moisture, Moseley said.

“It’s when the seed detaches from the inside of the pod that the seed is no longer protected by the plant,” he explained. “That’s when you’re going to get the most damage.”  ∆

OLIVIA MCCLURE: LSU AgCenter