Sugarcane leaves and twigs are useless. These things are sweet and have crude fiber, which cows like to eat.

Sugarcane leaves, also called sugarcane tails in rural areas of China, account for about 20% of the weight of the whole sugarcane.

The fresh leaves of sugarcane have at least the following functions:

First, it is used to feed cattle. Fresh sugarcane leaves are good cattle feed. As far as I know, Shangsi County in Guangxi once used sugarcane leaves to raise cattle on a large scale.

Sugarcane leaves can be directly fed to cattle, or stored for proper fermentation, and then taken out to feed when necessary. This method is very beneficial to solve the silage problem of cattle in winter.

Second, you can feed the fish with sugarcane leaves. Sugarcane leaves can also be thrown into fish ponds to feed fish, which is a good feed for raising grass carp. The advantage of feeding fish with sugarcane leaves is that you can take turns picking leaves during the growing period of sugarcane, and each sugarcane leaf only needs 8 to 9 leaves.

If the leaves of fruit cane are more effective, fish prefer to eat; If it is a sugarcane leaf, it looks a little harder and the effect is not so good. Generally speaking, sugarcane leaves produced by a sugarcane field of about 3 mu can feed grass carp on the surface of 1 mu. Some farmers have tried that feeding fish with sugarcane leaves can produce about 20% more fish.

Third, it is used to return farmland to make fertilizer. The utilization of sugarcane leaves is the most common. After harvesting sugarcane, many sugarcane farmers do not treat sugarcane leaves, let them pile up in sugarcane fields and return them to the fields as fertilizer.

Some farmers are more standardized, putting sugarcane leaves between sugarcane ridges and pressing them with mud to accelerate corruption into fertilizer. Personally, I think that the effect of returning sugarcane leaves directly to the field as fertilizer is not very good, but it is a last resort and a lazy practice.

The fourth is domestic fuel. Before that, when I was a child in the countryside, almost every household in the village planted sugar cane. After the sugarcane is harvested, the remaining sugarcane leaves are left in the ground to dry. When they are free, the dried sugarcane leaves are tied home to be used as household fuel.

Fifth, it is used to build shade sheds or weave farm tools. Sugarcane leaves, after drying, actually have many uses. In our rural hometown, many people like to weave dried sugarcane leaves into rows of leaf stalls and cover them on the shelves of simple temporary wooden houses to make straw houses. Some people weave sugarcane leaves into hemp fibers, which is also good for shelter from the wind and rain.