In northern Pointe Coupee Parish, Gertrude Hawkins and her brother, George LaCour, have farmed for more than three decades, growing the region’s traditional row crops — cotton, corn, soybeans and wheat.

In 1998, they started growing sugarcane, and by 2005, the crop became an integral part of their business as they grew it on 4,000 of their acres.

“We are fortunate to have very good soil,” Hawkins said. “We can farm just about any row crop. Sugarcane fits into the practice.”

Pointe Coupee Parish and Hawkins’ farmland lie north of the traditional core range for growing the crop, but over the past 20 years, the parish has become the state’s sugarcane leader. Between 2004 and 2022, Pointe Coupee farmers increased their sugarcane acreage from 32,000 acres to 72,681, according to AgCenter statistics, overtaking Louisiana’s longtime leader in the crop, Iberia Parish.

New sugarcane varieties developed by crop breeders have helped expand the crop’s range, and LSU AgCenter researchers are working to develop new varieties that will help the farmers of central Louisiana produce even more cane.

Expanding the Crop Range

Sugarcane is a tall, perennial grass that originated in the tropics. It has been a mainstay of Louisiana agriculture since Catholic priests first planted sugarcane in present-day New Orleans in 1751. The crop has been bred over two centuries to thrive in Louisiana’s subtropical climate. Today it is a $1.5 billion piece of the Louisiana economy grown in 24 parishes.

When sugarcane became a more viable crop for central Louisiana growers, it provided additional diversity to the Hawkins and LaCour farm business.

“The sugarcane varieties were also a contributing factor to our decision to grow sugarcane,” Hawkins said. “The varieties then and today have higher sugar and tonnage possibilities compared to varieties in the mid-1980s and earlier.”

Hawkins learned a great deal about sugarcane working at the sucrose lab at the AgCenter Sugar Research Station in St. Gabriel. In 2020, the recently refurbished lab was named after her following her retirement in 2019. She and her brother grow six different varieties of sugarcane to spread their risk if disease, insect pests or other problems affect a particular variety. They consistently rely on one variety, L01-299, which has been called a workhorse for Louisiana producers since its release in 2009.

AgCenter sugarcane breeders developed the variety over 12 years and found that it had good sucrose content and an erect growth habit, and it contains a gene that protects it from brown rust disease, according to Kenneth Gravois, the state sugarcane specialist and one of the breeders who developed the variety along with breeder Keith Bischoff.

L01-299 also tolerates the cold well, an important trait for a tropical plant grown in Louisiana’s subtropical environment. Louisiana sugarcane breeders have long focused on developing more cold-tolerant plants, said AgCenter sugarcane breeder Collins Kimbeng.

“We’re always fearful of a freeze,” Kimbeng said. “That happens sometimes in November. The cane cracks, and there’s bacteria that can get into the cane and start metabolizing the sucrose and converting it to reducing sugars, so the quality of the cane that gets delivered to the mill is poor.”

Because sugarcane is a perennial grass, a plant can produce for more than one growing season. After harvest, underground buds survive, and in the spring, they grow shoots that become the next crop. One plant can be harvested multiple times, and newer varieties can be harvested four to five times — or to the fourth or fifth “stubble.”

“You can keep them beyond third stubble,” Hawkins said of the new varieties. “That’s a big thing.”

Breeding cane that returns in the spring after a hard winter is important to Kimbeng.

“Planting is the most expensive operation,” Kimbeng said. “So we try to breed for ratoon-ability so they have the ability to come back even if there is a freeze.”

Developing Better Sugarcane

As the sugarcane growing belt stretches farther north, AgCenter researchers are testing the best ways to develop sugarcane for the region. While most plant breeding is done at the Sugar Research Station in St. Gabriel, researchers have begun testing an early generation of plant crosses farther north in Pointe Coupee Parish.

“The most variability in the breeding program is in the seedling generation,” Kimbeng said. “So we’re trying to see if we can capture that variability very early.”

If they find that planting early generations in a slightly colder environment leads to different selections in the breeding process, Kimbeng said, they may commit to more research farther north.

To increase the resilience of sugarcane, researchers have long used clones of wild species of sugarcane to cross with sugarcane developed for high sugar content.

“That allowed us to bring in genes that make our crop more resilient to abiotic stress or environmental stress because those plants grow in far hardier conditions than regular sugarcane,” Kimbeng said.

Through traditional breeding techniques, breeders have crossed and backcrossed wild sugarcane and cane bred for higher sugar content over generations, selecting plants for desired traits.

“They have been able to slowly increase the genes for climate resistance while maintaining the genes for sucrose.”

This way of breeding can take more than a decade to create a new variety that will benefit growers. Now, in a lab at the LSU campus in Baton Rouge, molecular breeding technologies are allowing them to directly analyze the genes of the sugarcane and speed up the process.

“We are able to map these genes and see where they are located on the chromosome,” Kimbeng said. “We’re able to work smarter. We’re able to more intelligently select these genes.”

The Future of Sugarcane Development

Sugarcane producers like Hawkins await more cold-hardy varieties that can withstand freezes late in their growing season.

“I think we have to keep working hard toward it,” she said.

Breeders from the AgCenter and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Sugarcane Research Unit in Houma are building on hundreds of years of work by growers and researchers to design sugarcane varieties that stand up to the challenges of Louisiana.

“We are standing on the shoulders of giants who came before us who have done some very good work,” Kimbeng said.

Kyle Peveto is the editor of Louisiana Agriculture.

This article appears in the spring 2024 edition of Louisiana Agriculture.