When making rum, how many tons of sugar cane are needed in order to have marketable amounts of rum?!
Answers: How many tons of sugar cane return how much molasses and likewise, how much molasses returns how much rum?
Your sugar yield from cane is around 10%, so you get roughly 1 ton of sugar per 10 tons of cane. Molasses is not directly proportional to the sugar as it's a by-product of extracting the sugar from the cane. It all depends on your extraction methods, efficiency, and desired outcome. Molasses comes in a variety of styles and sugar content.
When you're making rum, it depends on the final product you're aiming for to determine how much and what type of sugar and molasses to use and in what proportions. Depending on your recipe, you can estimate that 10 pounds of sugar/molasses will yield somewhere in the vicinity of one gallon of drinking strength rum (40%). This number varies depending on your recipes and the efficiency of your operation, but it's a nice even number to start your estimation.
So, the next question is just how much do you define "marketable amounts" of rum? 10 gallons a week? 100 gallons a day?
Using the previous approximations, 1 ton of cane should yield around 200 pounds of sugar. Those 200 pounds of sugar should yield around 20 gallons of rum.
So you can ballpark somewhere around 20 gallons of rum per ton of sugar cane...plus or minus. If you have a facility that can distill 100 gallons per day, that would necessitate processing 5 tons of cane per day...and so on.
Great project for you