
Nordzucker Post 1/2025 - 23 January 2025
Mackay Sugar: crushing season in Australia ended in January – total yield on average
The crushing season in Australia is over. On 14 January, the Marian site also ended its harvesting and processing of sugar cane.
Last week, the Mackay Sugar factory in Marian, Australia, ended the crushing season. Heavy rainfall and storms in the region had significantly affected the harvestability of the sugar cane. The Racecourse and Farleigh factories, which also belong to the Nordzucker subsidiary Mackay Sugar, had already ended the harvest and processing of the sugar cane for these reasons before Christmas.
In the 2024 processing phase, Mackay Sugar processed around 4.85 million tonnes of cane. “Our Australian colleagues at our three sites have mastered a very challenging crushing season with a high degree of commitment and dedication. They have worked hard to ensure that as much cane as possible could be harvested, crushed and processed,” says Michael Gerloff, Head of Business Unit Cane Sugar, summing up the past crush. For example, the site in Marian had technical difficulties in the first half of the processing phase of the sugar cane. In addition, the typical wet weather phase set in much earlier than in previous years during this crush. Gerloff adds: “This slowed us down considerably at times during the sugar cane harvest – especially given the high sugar cane yields. It remains our main priority to work on improving the reliability of our factories and assess how we can limit the duration of the next crushing season, also in the interest of our growers and supplier groups.”
Besides cane sugar production, the Mackay Sugar factories also specialise in generating electricity from the waste material left over from sugar cane processing, known as bagasse. More than half of the electricity generated in the factories during the season was fed into the public grid, covering a large part of the electricity needs of the city of Mackay and its population of around 80,000.
In Australia, too, the processing season is followed by the pre-season: and so the Australian factories are now starting the planned intensive maintenance and improvement measures.