Effects of Mechanical Harvesting on Sugarcane Stubble Quality and Growth of Ratoon

The experiment was conducted with the traditional manual harvesting and mechanical harvesting of sugarcane, to compare the effects of different harvesting method on the sugarcane stubble quality and the growth of ratoon. The experimental results are as follows. (i) The stubble height and breaking stubble rate of mechanical harvesting was significantly higher than manual harvesting, the stubble height of lodging species and difficult defoliation species increased in mechanical harvesting condition. Varieties with higher levels of fiber had lower rate of broken stubble. (ii) The effects of mechanical harvesting on germination of next year ratoon were quite different due to different varieties, indicating that the better perennial species have less impact than the poor perennial species. (iii) Compared with manual harvesting, mechanical harvesting had slightly higher plant height and single-stem weight and less effective stems number, the difference of cane yield was not significant, but sucrose content increased 0.53%. (iv) Mechanical harvesting combining with leaves crushing could reduce the impact on the germination of ratoon, improve the single-stem weight and increase the effective number of stems.