An assessment of harvesting practices of sugarcane in the central region of Thailand

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Expansion of sugarcane production for satisfying food and bioenergy demands along with decreasing availability of agricultural workers brings about the concerns on changing the traditional sugarcane cultivation and harvesting practice to mechanization. The study aims to assess the effect on climate change impact via life cycle greenhouse gas emissions along with harvesting costs from 5 current sugarcane harvesting practices in the central region of Thailand. The results show that harvested green cane using cutting machines has moderate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as compared to the other options but it has the highest harvesting cost due to the need for hiring cutting machines which can be quite expensive. Moreover, the insufficient availability of cutting machines in some areas has created a problem of system management. This has led farmers to choose the burning of cane as per the past practice due to the ease of finding labor. Therefore, it could be recommended that the actual cost of mechanized harvesting and good management of cutting machine services should be considered if we need to increase mechanical harvesting. There is no significant difference in the greenhouse gas emissions of various harvesting practices as the largest greenhouse gas emissions are actually from the land preparation stage. Even though the harvesting stage does not contribute much to the greenhouse gas emissions, there is still an opportunity for improvement of both GHG and cost performance for which measures are recommended. In addition, there is a need for further study on its contribution to other impacts such as microbiological properties of the soil and local air pollution from sugarcane trash burning.