2021 Sugar Crop on Schedule, Despite Rains

With the late start of the 2021 sugar crop season, is the industry on schedule to get the cane out of the farms and to the mills before the close of the season, which is fast approaching? The recent rains in the north caused by the remnants of Hurricane Agatha have had an effect on harvesting and milling, but Country Manager Mac McLachlan of A.S.R./B.S.I. is optimistic.

Mac McLachlan

Mac McLachlan, Country Manager, A.S.R. Group-Belize Sugar

“It has been a great crop so far. We’ve milled over nine hundred and twenty thousand tons of sugar cane at the moment. We had to have a short pause in the crop over the last few days because we were deluged with water last week, as you all know. We had something like twenty centimeters of water in about four days and that’s gonna sink the chances of delivering cane. We were receiving more mud and making more mud at the factory than we were sugar at one point, which is not good for a sugar factory. We had a short pause starting again this morning. The investments we made in our BELCOGEN cogeneration plant in the off crop last year really demonstrated more consistent steam supply this year; we had a much improved grinding rate. We are putting a second investment in this next off crop into the second boiler and that will improve the situation further. That’s helping to increase the grinding rate, the extracting rate of sugar and therefore in time to shorten the crop and to allow us to carry on debottlenecking other areas of the mill that are gonna improve that further.”