Kubota announced in November that its local subsidiary, Siam Kubota, began selling the company’s first sugarcane harvester, the SH-K1, in Thailand in October.
The wheeled machine has a 173 hp engine and is designed for small and midsize fields. It automatically adjusts the cutting height to help protect the base of the plant so it can grow back after harvest.
Kubota expects demand for machines that can harvest cane without burning to grow as farm labor becomes harder to find and restrictions on field burning tighten.
Source: Kubota
PSR Analysis: Sugar is made from the cane stalk. The leaves around the stalk make it harder to cut by hand. In Thailand, growers have traditionally burned off those leaves before harvest to make the stalks easier to cut. Workers can remove the leaves by hand, but that takes time. A harvester can cut the stalks and separate the leaves in one pass.
Where machine harvesting replaces burning followed by hand cutting, it reduces manual work and avoids the fine particles (PM2.5) released by burning the leaves.
In the 2025/26 season, 96.2% of the cane delivered to Thai sugar mills was harvested without burning. That figure includes cane cut by hand. One opportunity for the SH-K1 is in fields where growers already harvest without burning and larger machines are difficult to use.
For a contractor, recovering the cost of a harvester depends on how much cane it can cut in a short season. Even with the same area under contract, a contractor with fields farther apart will spend more of the season moving the machine. Siam Kubota asks prospective buyers how much land they plan to harvest, including land they own, rent or have agreed to harvest under contract. It also asks how much of that land is ready for machine harvesting and what they can afford in annual payments.
An early sign of demand for the SH-K1 will be whether contractors can line up enough work in nearby fields to keep one machine busy through the season.PSR
Akihiro Komuro is Research Analyst, Far East and Southeast Asia
