@Cashflow,

Maybe my point did not come out clearly. The hard part about cane comes when you are crushing it. As it is, small hand driven or motor driven household crushers will do fine if you were making juice for human consumption.They have no capacity to crush hard cane and as such, you would require mill house crushers. Normal mill crushers are heavy duty and some are meant to pass as much as 380 tonnes of cane per hour. Where do you start?. Cane knives, pound the cane using heavy duty hammers, shred (the smallest shredder i have seen weighs not less than 6 tonnes and has to be run at speeds of between 6500 to 8500 revs per minute! . Most, are steam driven even though technology is bringing in VFDs), scald using steam in the region of 180 degrees C (You would require a scalder and hence a medium pressure boiler of minimum 22TPH) and carry out diffusing (Here, you decant and lime) before passing your megasse through mill tandems to extract juice. Now, your hand crusher does not require all the said cane prep steps to get your juice.After cane prep comes de-watering and here you require mills running alongside HP hydraulics capable of delivering crushing pressure in the region of 20-30 MPa.In a nutshell, cane preparation is heavy duty machinery,capital and labour intensive. Let's not go to the maintenance and running costs...........really, being an engineer, you should already be seeing the impracticality!.....It's like hiring an FH lorry to transport 2 bags of maize from Mombasa to Nairobi!