Song Con Sugarcane Joint Stock Company will harvest sugarcane by machine.
(Baonghean) - Currently, one of the difficulties that sugarcane growing areas are facing is the lack of human resources in production, especially during the harvesting period. To solve this problem, Song Con Sugarcane Joint Stock Company will bring machines to pilot harvesting in the raw material growing areas, helping to solve the problem of human resources and reduce costs for sugarcane growers.
Lack of manpower to harvest sugarcane
During the period when sugarcane prices are falling, along with the increasing cost of labor for harvesting sugarcane, sugarcane growers have to increase their investment costs, so the profit from sugarcane is no longer much. This situation has been going on for many years but there is no solution.
Mr. Nguyen Van Tuat, a farmer in Mai Tan hamlet, Nghia Hoan commune (Tan Ky) is the household that grows the most raw sugarcane in the district, with over 21 hectares. Mr. Tuat shared: Planting, caring for, and harvesting sugarcane requires a lot of labor, especially during the harvest season, dozens of people are needed to cut, bundle, and carry sugarcane onto the truck bed... If not hired, the family would not have enough strength to do it, because sugarcane is heavy and requires strong people.
Therefore, during the sugarcane harvest season, the family has to hire dozens of healthy workers to harvest on time. However, there are times when they cannot find anyone to hire, because the local labor force is not much, most of them are middle-aged or older, because young people go to work far away. Therefore, the hiring fee is quite high, from 230,000 - 240,000 VND/ton, not including meals. Because they have to hire a lot of workers, every year Mr. Tuat's family has to pay a large sum of money, making the profit after harvesting sugarcane not much.
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| Harvesting sugarcane manually causes sugarcane growers to increase costs and slow down progress. Photo: Xuan Hoang |
The lack of sugarcane harvesters is not unique to Mr. Nguyen Van Tuat’s family, but has been widespread in Tan Ky district for many years, causing the sugarcane harvest to be delayed. Mr. Le Van Quy, an agricultural officer of Song Con Sugarcane Joint Stock Company, said that there were families who received orders to harvest sugarcane from the factory, but because they could not hire workers, they had to wait until the next day.
Sugarcane growers in Tan Ky are worried that when it comes to harvesting sugarcane, every household has to harvest sugarcane, so the need for unskilled labor is high. Sometimes, even after searching hard, they cannot hire laborers, and even if they can hire them, the price is very expensive (over 200,000 VND/ton). If they do not harvest on time, it will affect productivity and sugar content.
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| Harvested sugarcane is manually loaded onto trucks and taken to the factory. Photo courtesy |
To solve the labor problem, there is no other way but to apply mechanization, to ensure the two most important factors, which are reducing costs for sugarcane growers and speeding up the sugarcane harvesting process for farmers. This has been thought of by the factory for a long time, but due to the high cost of investing in machines, it has not been implemented. However, in the upcoming crushing season, Song Con Sugarcane Joint Stock Company will pilot the use of mechanization in sugarcane harvesting, by contracting machines.
Piloting mechanical sugarcane harvesting
The sugarcane raw material area of Song Con Sugarcane Joint Stock Company is nearly 7,000 hectares, of which nearly 5,000 hectares are in Tan Ky district. Currently, sugarcane is in the height development stage, and it is expected that there are about 2 months left until the 2019 - 2020 pressing season.
Mr. Nguyen Ba Quy - Deputy Director of Song Con Sugarcane Joint Stock Company said: In the context of a serious shortage of sugarcane harvesting labor in Tan Ky, the application of mechanization and machinery to sugarcane harvesting is the solution to this problem. Therefore, in the upcoming crushing season, the company will contract to bring a harvesting machine to pilot operation in the raw material area of Tan Ky district. Accordingly, the machine's capacity reaches 200 - 250 tons/day, productivity is hundreds of times higher than ordinary labor, 1 ton of sugarcane harvested by mechanical machine, sugarcane growers only pay 170,000 VND, much lower than manual harvesting. Harvesting by machine, people do not have to exert as much effort as before. Sugarcane is automatically rolled into the machine, milled short, leaves blown clean, sugarcane is loaded onto the truck, and transported to the factory.
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| Song Con Sugarcane Joint Stock Company will pilot the use of machinery in sugarcane harvesting, by contracting machines. Illustrative photo |
In preparation for the next sugarcane harvest, the Company will allocate more than 1 billion VND to repair some roads in the raw material area, creating favorable conditions for motor vehicles to transport sugarcane from the fields to the factory.
However, mechanical harvesting is only applicable to flat, large sugarcane fields that are planted and cared for by machines. Therefore, to mechanize sugarcane harvesting, localities need to promote land consolidation to create large sugarcane fields, and it is even better to apply double-row sugarcane planting.
In recent years, with the participation of local authorities and sugar factories, sugarcane farmers have been encouraged to consolidate and change plots, re-plan fields, build large sugarcane fields, apply synchronous sugarcane planting and care stages, apply machinery in land preparation, sugarcane planting and moving towards applying machine harvesting, in order to reduce production costs and increase income. Currently, in Tan Ky district, a number of concentrated sugarcane fields have been built in Giai Xuan, Tan Xuan, Nghia Hoan, Nghia Dong... each field has an area of 50 hectares or more.
