Viable Billet Seeding
During our early school years as children, we were encouraged to grow simple plants as part of our education. It seems to form part of our early school days that we are taught to plant seeds, and tasked with nurturing these seemingly lifeless specks of vegetation until they shoot up, green and healthy to surprise or delight. Great fun! Children are always fascinated as the seed bursts, and the first signs of green occur. There are though, always some kids that end up disappointed. Sometime the seed does nothing, or the resulting plant is weak and struggles to develop leaving us with nothing to show for our effort but a feeling of failure. Good teachers always offer encouragement to try with a new seed, which usually leads to success and the good feeling that growing living things instils into us.
Has anything changed? We have chosen to grow crop as a living? It’s the plant that you grew in the classroom. It’s the fun of planting something, and watching it grow. Cynics would say that it’s all about profit. Really? Most farmers could make more money on the stock market. But they are growers, simple as that! Show me the farmer who does not revel in a healthy crop, or stand proud as his peers comment on the quality of the plants?
But as in the classroom, commercial planting relies even more on seed quality to ensure successful germination and shoot development after planting. Of course, we all know that the seed we use is actually a chunk of cane stalk, so no mystery there. However, one of the advantages we have in Samart is that, as manufacturers we work with and talk with some of the most informed and influential players in our industry. So we thought that to delve a little further into the subject of seed cane with some of these people would not hurt.


We spoke with one of our customers, asking his approach to “seeding”. He, like many farmers used to sow whole cane stalks into the planting furrow and allow the eyes to germinate and shoot with the weather. However, the whole stalk method is limited by the natural formation of the nodes of the cane (the ring sections which appear along the length of the stalk). The nodes are the growth points, where the “eyes”, and eventually the shoots form. These occur only at the node base, so in whole stalk planting, the spacing between nodes limits the density of the plants per Rai. Billets, on the other hand can be planted upright, therefore potentially closer than the length of the natural node formation. This leads to more effective planting and using a mechanical planter our customer claimed a 20% increase in viable plants per Rai over whole stalk. Which with the right conditions increased the cane density and the tonnage per Rai. He also cited the issue that to avoid stem rot, whole full stalk seed cane needed to be totally clean of leaf, a process which was labour intensive and, which many farm workers have become unwilling to undertake.
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Other customers referred to the condition of the “eyes” when the seed is planted. It seems that even commercially obtained billet seed can suffer with “eye” damage and therefore poor germination. So, can we do anything to ensure maximum output from our seed? Well, like everything in life, nothing is guaranteed, and, as when we were in the classroom, selection of the best seed can pay dividends.
According to a study conducted in Baton Rouge in the USA by * Professor Jeffrey Hoy during 2001, various factors affect the success of billet planting. For him, the length of the seed billet was pivotal to successful germination. In the report, he observed that “Normal billets cut during harvest are about 10 inches (25 cm) long”, and suggests a longer seed billet of “20 inches (50 cm) long”.
Whilst this may be so, (logically as the length increases, so too does the likelihood of at least 4 “eyes” being present on the cane billet), 20 inches is probably too long to be commercially viable and risks unwarranted waste.
The other observation from Professor Hoy’s study was that “it is important to minimise physical damage to the billets, because pathogens that cause stalk rot gain entry to the internal tissues through wounds”.
We took a look at the cane product from a Samart machine with an agronomist from USA during early 2024 who was evaluating our product versus seed cane production. On a standard SM200 C machine, the billets were measured at 31-33 cm long which is a nice compromise versus the “ideal” suggested by Professor Hoy. Checking the “eyes”, most billets had 4 or more. And more importantly, there was little or no evidence of damage either to the stalk flanks or the “eyes”.
The Samart chopper system was revised in 2022 after COVID, and it seems that although at that time we designed the Samart machines to conform to our own concepts of harvester performance, those fall in with the parameters laid down by some eminent people in our business for seed cane suitability. Many of our customers have been using “seed” from our harvesters for years so, that really should not come as a surprise. It’s just that sometimes we need to look at what we are producing and find out whether it fully suits our customer needs. If customers can confidently use the cane product from our machines to cut down on cost for their new season planting then we are fulfilling our obligation to put the customer first. It’s what we do. Choose Samart, Choose life.