Crop stop - that's what's happened in the north as the sugar industry has been forced to put things on pause. It's not a commercial dispute, and it's not the end of the crop - in fact it's very farm from the end. But, things have had to be put on pause because of the bad weather causing poor cane quality, cane that is full of mud, and problems at the mill because of all that mud.
Stakeholders too the decision to shut it down at the end of milling this evening - and ASR/BSI explained why in a zoom press conference today:
William A. Neal, Communications, ASR/BSI
"This is not a good time to be harvesting because obviously, the amount of mud and the difficulty that farmers have to extract their cane makes it extremely difficult. So you spend far more energy, in terms of physical energy and also, gas, etc., to actually bring cane to the factory once they're at the factory. We have to really, deal with more than double the amount of mud that the factory can afford to process at this juncture."
"So it's really not a good, time to actually continue with the cane season, simply because the challenges at the farm level and at the factory level are just, extraordinary. The cost in terms of what we're spending to try and extract sugar from cane that has very poor quality at this juncture, simply because the rains have been so consistent, makes it, you know, just not viable for us to continue, with the cane crop at this juncture."
"The impact on cane quality alone is something that is worrisome. And then the impact on the factory is also, you know, costly because you're grinding mud board and you're grinding sugar and the dirt when it gets into the cogs of the, factory itself. You know, create break down and wear and tear that is unusual."
"And even when we have, request in terms of the amount of cane that we'd like to bring to the factory on a daily basis, we're not meeting those, quotas at all. So we know that we're operating in deficits all around. And so we'll definitely see a fall off in terms of cane price and the estimate."
"And that will affect both the, farmers and the factory. We already are looking at the, losses that we'll have this year. And it will be a tremendous and I'm sure farmers will probably, say the same thing."
"So this, is really the best case scenario for farmers and for the mill. They cannot take out their cane, the quality of the cane is so poor that you're paid for sugar."
"You won't be bringing sugar to the factory. So I think the best case situation is to do exactly what we're doing and to, have an industry pause."
We should note that there are also critically low levels of bagasse in stock- which powers the boilers at the mill - and feeds BEL's power grid through BELCOGEN. That bagasse powered plant has also been forced offline. We'll have more on this shutdown later on in the news.
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