EXTREMELY LOW SUGAR YIELDS severely hurt the earning of farmers during the 2016 cane harvest.
Senior agronomist with the Barbados Agricultural Management Company (BAMC), Dr Sandra Bellamy, told the DAILY NATION at yesterday’s open day of the BAMC’s Agronomy Research Station at Groves, St George, that the problem was likely to affect future harvests because of the way the disease that caused it was spread.
While she was unable to provide precise figures at the time, Bellamy revealed that some farmers had reported yields as low as five to six tonnes per acre, a fifth of what was expected.
“We had fields in the 2016 crop yielding as low as five and six tonnes of cane per acre, [while] we were expecting 25 tonnes,” she said. (MR)
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