re: A Question for Cane Farmers on Cold Tolerance

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Gotcha. Sounds more like a milling bottleneck than a growing/climate bottleneck, then.

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That's not the case. There's new acres getting put into cane every year. It's literally a climate and soils issue.

Sugarcane is a tropical crop. South American farmers can get multiple harvests out of a field in a single year, and the cane is much larger down there.

Here, however, cane is at its northern limits. This is part of the reason cane stubble is burned, because if they leave it on the ground too long, the soil may not get to the temperature it needs to be long enough for growth. Once you get far enough north where hard freezes happen pretty regularly, the climate is no longer suitable for cane.

On top of that, the best soils for can production are the alluvial soils along the Atchafalaya and Mississippi. Once you get so far west (i.e., onto the prairie), the productivity of those soils drops of significantly.