Satellite Monitoring Determines Sugarcane Loss Causes

About Mexican Sugarcane Production

Mexico is one of the top ten sugarcane producers in the world ^{Production - sugar. Sugar. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service.}. Sugarcane is used in a variety of ways, including biofuel and other chemical uses, but the most prominent one is sucrose, which is then made into sugar. Sugarcane mills in Mexico produce about 5.5 million metric tons annually ^{Mexico: Sugar Annual. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service.}. That is quite a market that, however, has been showing signs of decline lately.

Sugarcane thrives only under ideal conditions: warm temperatures with ample sunlight year-round, high precipitation levels, and fertile soil. But with today’s shifting climate and unpredictable weather, its production is becoming increasingly tricky.

Challenge: Last Season Yield Decline

Declining sugar production has removed sugarcane from the top crop markets in Mexico, and the last ten years witnessed a never-before-seen fall in yields. In the 2023/2024 season, the yield saw a 20% decrease compared to the average seasonal numbers. Local sugar production fell to 4,701,000 tons from the average of 6 million tons per harvest. As you can see, the change is quite evident.

The problem this season is not just the drop in sugarcane yield per hectare. Another notable difference is the concentration levels of sucrose in the cane stems, which have also decreased. To avoid the same losses next season, the producers needed to know the reason for such a dramatic decline. But the causes were yet to be determined.

Solution: Vegetation And Humidity Indices And Historical Weather Data

Israel Antonio Gómez Juárez, a PhD in agricultural sciences, an agricultural consultant specializing in sugarcane and citrus, technical manager of the agricultural division of the company TYSAGSA, and professor at the Faculty of Biological and Agricultural Sciences of the Universidad Veracruzana, decided to research to determine the causes. For that, he needed a lot of data, including historical information. Contacting each farmer in the country was too time and resource-consuming. He decided to turn to EOS Data Analytics and used EOSDA Crop Monitoring as the data source. During its development, sugarcane goes through the stages of sprouting, vegetative growth, and ripening. Israel concluded that since the low sucrose concentration was present from the beginning of the harvest season, it made sense to consider the climatic factor during the ripening stage.

Israel selected the most representative fields of the 48 sugar mills in the nine regions of Mexico ^{List of sugar mills that carried out the 2022/2023 harvest. CONADESUCA.}. There, the same parameters were compared on 76 fields during the last five consecutive years to see the tendency and determine the changes. Israel used a variety of indices, including NDVI (normalized difference vegetation index), MSAVI (modified soil adjusted vegetation index), NDWI (normalized difference water index), NDMI (normalized difference moisture index), and NDRE (normalized difference red edge index).

The indices allowed him to see the ripening and harvesting processes unfold. Israel chose October-January of 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 as a dataset for the ripening. NDVI maps below show the comparison of the Central El Potrero field in the 2022/23 and 2023/24 seasons. In some periods, the red on the images showed the lack of vegetation coverage in the field. It is seen for both seasons at the same time.

During the ripening period: the higher the rainfall, the higher the relative humidity, the lower the solar radiation, the higher the minimum temperatures, and the lower the temperature differential, and consequently, the lower the sucrose in the stems.

Israel Antonio Gómez Juárez

Participant in the ExpoMeeting for ATAM

Other datasets used were moisture indices and climatic factors that might have impacted both growth and development stages. Climatic factors included daily maximum temperature, minimum temperature, rainfall, relative humidity, evapotranspiration, and solar radiation. All of that data was taken from the EOSDA Crop Monitoring.

Israel then correlated the data between industrial yields and crop development using NDVI and NDMI to see the difference throughout the last five harvesting seasons. As a result, the cause of the decline in sugarcane production was determined.

Outcome: Cause Of The Decline Determined

Rainfall in the 2023/24 season significantly differed from the rest of the seasons. It impacted the growth stages several times throughout the year. There is a period called the ‘Big Growth Stage’ that usually occurs between May and September each year. During this time, the rainfall was 20% below the average of the last 5 years and poorly distributed, with a deficit in June and September. As for sugarcane, enough water is essential, and in 2024, the crops did not reach normal growth levels and did not consume enough nitrogen.

In the ripening period of October till January, the rainfall was excessive, leading to the growth leap instead of storing sucrose. All of the energy was directed toward the second development stage instead of ripening. The atypical rainfall levels, lower in the growth period and higher in the ripening period, are the main reason for the low yields obtained in most mills during the 2023/2024 season. Due to that, the harvest was no good and was replaced by imported produce.

Modern technology allowed Israel to obtain all that data and come to the above conclusions, and the EOSDA Crop Monitoring helped significantly. The research aimed to determine the cause of the low harvest, and that goal was met. Israel developed a set of recommendations for his fellow sugarcane producers to avoid such losses in the future. One of his recommendations is to invest in technological tools, such as remote sensing monitoring platforms that give access to satellite, high-precision weather, forecasting, and management data.

EOSDA Crop Monitoring provides its users with all the information necessary to make effective decisions that help prevent, adapt, and solve problems and conditions that affect their crops.

Antonio Emmanuel Quesada Ramirez

Senior Customer Success Manager EOSDA API Connect

Israel did not use any input from the field owners and was able to conduct the research relying solely on satellite data. Remote sensing helps users evaluate their field conditions without actually visiting the location, saving them time and resources. Optimizing the resources and using the data effectively might be enough to save sugarcane production in Mexico and increase productivity, making it great again.