Land management in Mexican sugarcane crop fields

The sucrose contained in sugarcane is the main input for sugar production in Mexico. It is thus necessary to examine the ability of Mexican sugarcane farms to provide raw material in order to achieve a better sustainability and competiveness of sugar industry. Therefore, area expansion for sugar, bioenergy and biofuels will depend on weather and soil conditions, production cost changes, land tenure and plot size and the level of continued investment by stakeholders for innovations. Sugarcane cultivation is mainly located in the rainfed cultivation system; accordingly, crop fields have heterogeneous productivity, with a decrease of 11% in the last decade, and high vulnerability to weather effects. Therefore, requires a multidisciplinary approach, as Precision Agriculture (PA), Remotely Sensed yield estimation and Agro Ecological Zoning (AEZ), focused at regional and local scale, considering the biophysical constraints to improve the sustainable sugarcane production. The main findings of this study, with the application of AEZ and PA tools, showed that Mexican sugarcane crop fields have a differentiated land suitability into four levels: 20.07% of the total planted area is classified as high aptitude, 56.34% as medium, and 23.59% as low with high vulnerability to climate variability; We also determined that total potential sugarcane yield is 78.11 t ha−1, but actual yield is 68.60 t ha−1 (12% lower) because in 777,078 ha for the 2016/2017 harvest season; 13 sugar mills (25.5%) produced cane yield below 60 t ha−1, 21 between 60 and 80 t ha−1 (41.2%) and 17 above 80 t ha−1 (33.3%). Therefore, the unsuitable areas must be converted to agroecological management practices in combination with conventional approaches to increase yields. The Mexican sugar industry requires public policies differentiated by agro-ecological zone for yield and productivity optimization.