If sugar costs $1.70/kg, but takes 100kgs of sugarcane and over 2000L of water to produce that 1 kg, how is the end product profitable?

Question

If sugar costs $1.70/kg, but takes 100kgs of sugarcane and over 2000L of water to produce that 1 kg, how is the end product profitable?

In: 300

Answer 1

I have no idea how the 100->1kg myth came around (but it’s wide spread)

Because either the plants (that have been selectively bred for maximum sugar content for hundreds of years) would contain very little sugar or that the sugar extraction process would be very inefficient (after hundreds of years of figuring out exactly how to get the maximum amount of sugar out of a plant).

The truth is the opposite. Sugarproducing plants contain a very high amount of sugar (10-15% for sugar cane, 12-20% for sugar beets) and the extraction method is rather efficient, yielding on average 10-12% sugar per unit of plant matter and (at least for sugar beets) another 5% high quality animal feed. The rest of the weight is mainly water.