Usina Caeté Plantio vertical de cana na Usina Caeté reduz 4,5 toneladas de muda por hectare

At the Caeté Sugar Mill in São Miguel dos Campos, Alagoas, Saulo Almeida, agricultural manager responsible for irrigation operations, crop management, and manual planting, hosted CanaOnline's Technical Tour of the Northeast Sugarcane Region and took us to see a sugarcane field 60 to 70 days after vertical planting. This means that instead of the sugarcane stalks being placed horizontally in the furrow, they were planted upright, vertically. The field was in a rainfed area and planted with the RB-08791 sugarcane variety. “Caeté is a company that always seeks innovation. And, faced with the difficulty of finding labor and to reduce seed costs, we looked for a way to improve our planting. We adopted vertical planting, achieving a very positive result. The sugarcane field has good tillering, and we considerably reduced the volume of seed. In conventional planting, we use between 10 and 11 tons; with vertical planting, we reduced it to six tons,” Saulo pointed out. To carry out the practice, Caeté uses the Sugarcane Scalpel implement, developed by producer Edilson Maia. With a spacing of 1.5 meters, the Scalpel furrows, forming a cleft and applying all the inputs at the base of the planting – the phosphorus and biological source, according to Caeté's planting protocol. Then it layers the sugarcane vertically. Initially, the spacing between plants was 50 cm, then they changed it to 30 cm. And the sugarcane field closed perfectly. “We started this practice in the replanting modality of the sugarcane field, then moved on to planting, and the result is quite positive in both modalities. We observed parity in terms of the speed of sugarcane development, but greater resistance to climatic conditions. Sugarcane fields that faced drought are more vigorous and suffered less,” informed Saulo. Check out the details in the video: