Australian Sugar Cane Harvest: Burn and Biofuel #sugarcane #queenslandaustralia #foodindustry

Feel like munching on some giant grass? Or use biofuel to power your home? You can do both with sugarcane. Let's head to Queensland, Australia to find out more. Sweet sugar. Australia produces over 4 million tonnes of it every year. So where does it come from and how is it made? Sugar is the product of the sugarcane plant. This tall grass grows best in wet tropical areas with plenty of sunshine. In fact, with the right conditions, it can grow more than 2 metres high. While chewing on a sugarcane stalk sure does taste sweet, it takes a lot more work than that to get sugar onto your spoon. Just waiting for crops to grow can take up to a year or more. In the Burdekin region, the sugarcane capital of Australia, harvesting sometimes begins with a burn. This kind of grass is far too much for any lawnmower to handle. Sometimes even a hefty harvester can struggle to work its way through a tangled leafy crop. A burn helps to remove the outer leaves before bringing in the big machinery. Just make sure you keep your distance. These fast-moving fires burn hot. Most of the time, farmers can move straight to harvesting without the need to burn. Impressive machines cut off the stalks, pick them up and spit them out into the back of a truck. The truck drivers waste no time loading the cage of stalks onto road or rail transport before heading back for another load. The next stop is the sugar mill. Here the sugarcane is shredded and crushed to extract the sweet sugarcane juice. Once the juice is filtered, a process of heating and evaporating produces thick molasses, which is then dried until only sugar crystals remain. This raw sugar is then stored, ready to be shipped overseas or sent to a sugar refinery. Sugar refineries process the sugar further before packaging it ready for people to eat. Back at the sugar mill, nothing goes to waste. Bagasse, the leftover sugarcane fibre, is a very helpful bio-waste. From this, biofuel is produced for the sugar mill's boiler. So much power is generated that it can also be fed back into the power grid for households in the region. There has even been success in creating bagasse biofuel for jet engines. Now that's an impressive sugar energy boost.