Sugarcane Settling Transplanting Technology for Improving Yield and Profit Maximization

A sugarcane cultivation model combining nine improved sugarcane cultivation practices named as Sugarcane Settling Transplanting Technology (STT) was established in ICAR-Sugarcane Breeding institute, Coimbatore, and was evaluated for reducing cultivation cost, improving productivity, increasing profitability and ensuring sustainability in sugarcane agriculture over conventional method. Transplanting healthy settlings derived from treated single bud setts of high yielding better quality variety in paired row-wider row spacing, intercropping, drip irrigation, drip fertigation, trash mulching and incorporation, multiple ratooning and mechanization are the cultural practices combined in STT. The assessment was carried out for five years (2018-2023) in 1 Plant + 5 Ratoon crops. STT as a package resulted in 80% saving in seed cane requirement and 38% saving in planting cost, saving of 52% water, 90% labourer cost for irrigation and 50% power consumption over conventional furrow method. Intercropping resulted in 10-15% improvement in cane yield and provided interim and additional income over conventional method. Cane yield with black gram intercropping in plant crop was 147 t ha–1 and the average cane yield in five ratoon crops was 93 t ha–1 under STT. Yield gain over control was 6% in Plant crop and average gain of 16% in five ratoons. At the end of five years, STT system as a whole showed 13.16% higher cane yield than conventional method. STT generated benefit cost ratio of 1.93 at the end of five years. Soil organic carbon content increased to 0.70% from the initial 0.53%. Hence, adoption of STT improves productivity with reduced cost of cultivation and ensures sustainability.