Sugar cane in the context of "Sorghum"

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⭐ Core Definition: Sugar cane

Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of tall, perennial grass (in the genus Saccharum, tribe Andropogoneae) that is used for sugar production. The plants are 2–6 m (6–20 ft) tall with stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sucrose, which accumulates in the stalk internodes. Sugarcanes belong to the grass family, Poaceae, an economically important flowering plant family that includes maize, wheat, rice, and sorghum, and many forage crops. It is native to New Guinea.

Sugarcane was an ancient crop of the Austronesian and Papuan people. The best evidence available today points to the New Guinea area as the site of the original domestication of Saccharum officinarum. It was introduced to Polynesia, Island Melanesia, and Madagascar in prehistoric times via Austronesian sailors. It was also introduced by Austronesian sailors to India and then to Southern China by 500 BC, via trade. The Persians and Greeks encountered the famous "reeds that produce honey without bees" in India between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. They adopted and then spread sugarcane agriculture. By the eighth century, sugar was considered a luxurious and expensive spice from India, and merchant trading spread its use across the Mediterranean and North Africa. In the 18th century, sugarcane plantations began in the Caribbean, South American, Indian Ocean, and Pacific island nations. The need for sugar crop laborers became a major driver of large migrations, some people voluntarily accepting indentured servitude and others forcibly imported as slaves.

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Sugar cane in the context of Plantation economy

A plantation economy is an economy based on agricultural mass production, usually of a few commodity crops, grown on large farms worked by laborers or slaves. The properties are called plantations. Plantation economies rely on the export of cash crops as a source of income. Prominent crops included cotton, rubber, sugar cane, tobacco, figs, rice, kapok, sisal, Red Sandalwood, and species in the genus Indigofera, used to produce indigo dye.

The longer a crop's harvest period, the more efficient plantations become. Economies of scale are also achieved when the distance to market is long. Plantation crops usually need processing immediately after harvesting. Sugarcane, tea, sisal, and palm oil are most suited to plantations, while coconuts, rubber, and cotton are suitable to a lesser extent.

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Sugar cane in the context of Petrochemical

Petrochemicals (sometimes abbreviated as petchems) are the chemical products obtained from petroleum by refining. Some chemical compounds made from petroleum are also obtained from other fossil fuels, such as coal or natural gas, or renewable sources such as maize, palm fruit or sugar cane.

The two most common petrochemical classes are olefins (including ethylene and propylene) and aromatics (including benzene, toluene and xylene isomers).

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Sugar cane in the context of Plantation

Plantations are farms specializing in cash crops, usually mainly planting a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. Plantations, centered on a plantation house, grow crops including cotton, cannabis, tobacco, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar cane, opium, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, fruits, rubber trees and forest trees. Protectionist policies and natural comparative advantage have sometimes contributed to determining where plantations are located.

In modern use, the term usually refers only to large-scale estates. Before about 1860, it was the usual term for a farm of any size in the southern parts of British North America, with, as Noah Webster noted, "farm" becoming the usual term from about Maryland northward. The enslavement of people was the norm in Maryland and states southward. The plantations there were forced-labor farms. The term "plantation" was used in most British colonies but very rarely in the United Kingdom itself in this sense. There it was used mainly for tree plantations, areas artificially planted with trees, whether purely for commercial forestry, or partly for ornamental effect in gardens and parks, when it might also cover plantings of garden shrubs.

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Sugar cane in the context of Surface irrigation

Surface irrigation is where water is applied and distributed over the soil surface by gravity. It is by far the most common form of irrigation throughout the world and has been practiced in many areas virtually unchanged for thousands of years.

Surface irrigation is often referred to as flood irrigation, implying that the water distribution is uncontrolled and therefore, inherently inefficient. In reality, some of the irrigation practices grouped under this name involve a significant degree of management (for example surge irrigation).

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Sugar cane in the context of Subirrigation

Subirrigation also known as seepage irrigation, is a method of irrigation where water is delivered to the plant root zone. The excess may be collected for reuse.

Subirrigation is used in growing field crops such as tomatoes, peppers, and sugar cane in areas with high water tables such as Florida and in commercial greenhouse operations.

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Sugar cane in the context of History of Barbados

Barbados is an island country in the southeastern Caribbean Sea, situated about 100 miles (160 km) east of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Roughly triangular in shape, the island measures some 21 miles (34 km) from northwest to southeast and about 14 miles (23 km) from east to west at its widest point. The capital and largest town is Bridgetown, which is also the main seaport.

Barbados was inhabited by indigenous peoples – Arawaks and Caribs – prior to the European colonisation of the Americas in the 16th century. The island was briefly claimed by the Spanish Empire who saw trees with a beard like feature (hence the name Barbados), and then by Portugal from 1532 to 1620. The island was an English and later a British colony from 1625 until 1966. Sugar cane cultivation in Barbados began in the 1640s, which saw the increasing importation of black slaves from West Africa. Several black slave codes were implemented in the late-17th century which resulted in several slave rebellion attempts, however none was successful. The Consolidated Slave Law was passed following the largest slave rebellion in Barbadian history, this was then followed by the total abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. Britain continued to rule the island until independence was granted in 1966 and the state became a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.

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Sugar cane in the context of Nadi

Nadi (Fijian: [ˈnandi] nan-DEE, Fiji Hindi: नदी) is the third-largest city in Fiji, after Suva and Lautoka. It is located on the western side of the main island of Viti Levu, and had a population of 59,707 at the most recent census, in 2017. Nadi is multiracial with many of its inhabitants Asians, Indian or Indigenous Fijians, along with a large transient population of foreign tourists. Along with sugar cane production, tourism is a mainstay of the local economy.

The Nadi region has Fiji's highest concentration of hotels and motels. With its large Indo-Fijian population, Nadi is a centre for Hinduism in Fiji. It has the largest Hindu temple in the Southern hemisphere, a site for pilgrims called Sri Siva Subramaniya temple.

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Sugar cane in the context of Lautoka

Lautoka (Fijian pronunciation: [lɔu̯toka] , Fiji Hindi: लौटोका) is the second largest metropolitan area in Fiji. It is on the west coast of the island of Viti Levu, in the Ba Province of the Western Division. Lying in the heart of Fiji's sugar cane-growing region, the city has come to be known as the Sugar City. Covering an area of 32 square kilometres, it had a population of 71,573 at the 2017 census, the most recent to date.

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Sugar cane in the context of Zombie

A zombie (Haitian French: zombi; Haitian Creole: zonbi; Kikongo: zumbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies appear in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magical practices in religions like Vodou. Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as fungi, radiation, gases, diseases, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc.

The English word zombie was first recorded in the 18th century; dictionaries trace its origins to Bantu languages, such as Kimbundu nzumbi 'ghost, spirit'. One of the first books to expose Western culture to the concept of the voodoo zombie was W. B. Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929), the account of a narrator who encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls.

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