Sugarcane

Marketing

Traditionally sugarcane was cultivated to produce jaggery (gur), for chewing and extraction of juice for beverage purpose. Even after white sugar production from sugarcane was started, the traditional use continues on a large scale.
About 40 percent of the cane produced is marked for jaggery production.

About 1.5 to 2.0 percent of the cane produced is marketed for chewing and beverage purposes. Chewing canes are in great demand during festival times and fetch very high returns for the chewing cane growers. Sugarcane juice is in great demand in urban areas particularly during summer months.
About 10.0 percent of cane cultivated is used/marketed for seed and feed purposes.

Sugar Factories

There are 427 sugar factories in India of which 249 are co-operative units. About 47.0 percent of the sugarcane is marketed by the farmers to the sugar factories.

Number of sugar factories in operation in some important States of India

State	Co-operatives	Total
Andhra Pradesh	14	36
Bihar	-	11
Gujarat	17	17
Haryana	10	13
Karnataka	18	33
Kerala	3	7
Madhya Pradesh	48	48
Maharashtra	117	120
Punjab	14	21
Tamil Nadu	16	36
U.P.(Total)	32	115
ALL INDIA	249	427

To ensure adequate cane supply for crushing, factories make proper varietal planning, demarcate cane area and arrange for registration of cane area.
Registration of cane on area basis is an important requirement so that cane growers are bound by an agreement to supply their cane to the mills without diverting to other purposes. Whenever jaggery prices are high farmers tend to divert canes for jaggery.
The farmers make cane registration with the factories usually at the time of planting with details of location, extent of area, variety, date of planting etc. This facilitates the factories to provide financial assistance and other technical guidance to the growers besides scheduling the harvest in time to avoid loss to the grower and to the factory.

Transport of Cane

Organising an efficient cane transport system is of paramount importance, so that the cane is delivered at required quantity within 24 hours.
Optimum economic distance for cane transport ranges from 10 to 26 km.

Cane price and Payment

The price for the sugarcane supplied to the sugar factory is fixed by the local state governments based on the cost of cultivation and other factors and the price is linked to the sugar recovery. The Tamil Nadu State Government has recently (year 2000) fixed a price of Rs.1000 per tonne of cane with 10 percent sugar recovery.
The sugar factories make payment to the registered cane growers through banks.

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Tamilnadu

Sugarcane

About Sugarcane

History
Morphology

Sugarcane Management

Services Overview

The key services offered by Ikisan are:

System study, design and development of IT enabled solutions and services for the agri sector.

Execution of rural IT enabled projects on BOT/BOOT/Turnkey basis.

Development, Customization and Deployment of Ikisan's IPR protected software applications.

Providing support services and best management practices for augmenting the marketing development efforts of the groups agricultural input companies (NFCL and NACL).

Development and Dissemination of best practice and information though a unique multi lingual knowledge website for the agri sector.

Some of the key customers/partners that benefit significantly from our work include are Electronics Corporation of India Ltd, State Agricultural Marketing Boards, Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture, Tamilnadu, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Motorola Mobility (GOOGLE) etc.

As highlighted earlier Ikisan provides significant support to the market development and marketing efforts of NFCL and NACL by providing best practices and information across the agricultural input value chain - weather, soil, seeds, fertilizers, water, pesticides, output prices etc. that have enabled the companies to develop deep customer relationships and in turn enable them to grow above market growth rates. Recently example in fertilizers includes the development of Customized Fertilizer Grades (for NFCL across India that are crop and location specific have not only reduced the current consumption of fertilizers of farmers but have significantly enhanced crop yields and farmer incomes) that are expected to add significant revenues to the company.

Currently, agriculture value chain is driven by technical expertise. However, there is a lack of adequate Management knowledge and skills amongst the professionals. Therefore, Ikisan and XLRI, Jamshedpur have jointly developed an Agri Business Management Program for Agri-professionals and students. Ikisan provides the domain expertise while XLRI provides pedagogy. This program is a combination of virtual learning and campus based module at XLRI, Jamshedpur. This program has been highly appreciated.

Intellectual Property Rights for many software applications such as Field Manager, Vyapar, Mandi, Quick Solutions Systems, Management Time Table, Agri Information System and Agrecommerz belong to Ikisan. A significant recent development in this area is the introduction of Weather Based Crop Insurance. This entails setting up of Automatic Weather Stations, which provide dynamic village-level data essential for settlement of weather based insurance claims.