On a late-October morning, Siddeshwar Bendre noticed a white arrow-shaped tassel rising from a lone stalk in his four-acre sugarcane field. “I knew it was a flower. But given that cane shouldn’t flower this early, I did not pay much attention and simply nipped it off,” said the 55-year-old from Bathan village in Mangalwedha taluka of Maharashtra’s Solapur district.
But it wasn’t a freak incident. Within days of appearance of that first flower, there were more such slender, silky inflorescence on many of his cane plants. By mid-November, when the cane cutting labourers from Utopian Sugars Ltd’s factory at Pantnagar in the same taluka came, Bendre’s entire field was a melange of green plants with long and loose white tassels jutting out from them.
Bendre had planted his 18-month-duration adsali cane crop in July 2023. It should have matured and been ready to harvest only towards late-December 2024. But early flowering – marking the end of its vegetative growth period and accumulation of sucrose (sugar) in the stalks – cut short his crop’s life cycle: “Those white flowers are to be blamed”.
Bendre’s isn’t an isolated case though, with early flowering of sugarcane reported across Maharashtra. When the 2024-25 season (October-September) began, the state was projected to produce about 102 lakh tonnes (lt) of sugar, down from 110.20 lt in 2023-24. The latest estimates, however, suggest a further drop to 85-87 lt.
“I have seen sugarcane flowers in March-April (when mills are close to winding up operations), but never in November (at the start of the crushing season). Kadhich jhala na hota (This is unprecedented),” he said.
For Bendre, his sugarcane producing flowers by late-October wasn’t just an unusual and untimely botanical phenomenon, it has impacted his cane yield, which averaged 35 tonnes per acre this time, from 42 tonnes in 2023.
As on January 28, Maharashtra mills had crushed 596.38 lt of cane and produced 53.72 lt of sugar this season at an average recovery of 9.01%. During the corresponding period of the 2023-24 season, they had crushed 673.88 lt and produced 64.27 lt with an average 9.54% sugar recovery.
B B Thombare, president of West Indian Sugar Mills Association, expects mills in Solapur and the Marathwada-Khandesh regions to shut for the season by mid-February, those in central Maharashtra (Pune, Ahmednagar and Nashik) by mid-March, and the rest (including in Satara, Sangli and Kolhapur) by end-March.
“Our mills commenced crushing in mid-November and the season normally extends till end-April/early-May. The current one will be a very short season,” he told The Indian Express.
Rohan Paricharak, managing director of Utopian Sugars, didn’t see his factory crushing beyond January-end. “We previously assumed crushing at 4.5 lt, but now even 3.75 lt seems difficult. There’s hardly much cane available to crush,” he said.
Thombre attributed the low cane yields to two reasons. The first was the extended drought from around August 2023 till April-May 2024, when the already planted cane faced severe moisture stress. This was followed by excess rainfall in the 2024 southwest monsoon season, accompanied by very little sunshine. “The resultant climate shock – first from no rain and then too much of it, with the crop in the wet fields deprived of both aeration and daylight – is probably what triggered early flowering,” he added.
Shivaji Sathe, a farmer from the same village as Bendre, agreed with Thombre. “Flowering is a signal that the cane crop has matured. It will not gain any more weight or accumulate more sugar and is ripe for harvesting. But here, we have flowering happening in October-November, when it shouldn’t be before March-April. Vatavaran madhe badal (this is nothing but climate change),” he pointed out.
In the event of flowering, cane stops growing and sucrose stored in its stalks moves to the plant’s tip, where it is used for flower development. It, then, leads to a loss of cane weight as well as sucrose content recoverable as sugar.
Sathe, known as a “champion” cane grower for setting yield records in his area, is one of the few farmers whose crop escaped excess early flowering. He somehow ensured it did not suffer from moisture stress, despite the nearby Bhima River drying up and the district collector disconnecting electricity supplies in April-May 2024 to stop lifting of water. But even Sathe could harvest only 60 tonnes per acre from his 14-acres holding, compared to his 80 tonnes standard.
The 62-year-old has done a “post-mortem” of why his yields have taken a hit. “It was only due to climate change and not any fault in my agricultural practices. In most farmers’ fields, the cane did not get adequate water during the grand growth period (about 100 days after planting, when the stalks rapidly gain height and girth). But from June onwards, it poured almost continuously. We also had few sunny days and cold nights, necessary for sucrose accumulation period. That extreme combination caused early flowering, including in my case,” he said.
With lower output in Maharashtra and also UP – the cane crop there has faced setbacks from red rot fungal disease and top shoot borer pest attacks – the Centre is unlikely to allow any further export of sweetener in current season.
White arrow-shaped tassel in a sugarcane field 
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