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1631 Virginia House of Burgesses 63 Wee humbly intreate his Ma(jes)ty will bee pleased to add unto us the continuance of his princely assistance,..prohibiting all ratoones and second cropps.

1732 R. Robertson Detection State & Situation Sugar Planters 35 Very little of it [sc. the sugarcane crop] yielding a Ratoon (that is, when the ripe Cane being cut off, the same Root shoots forth new Branches).

1777 W. Robertson Hist. Amer. (1778) I. 459 On the banks of the Essequebo, thirty crops of ratoon canes have been raised successively.

1827 Western Monthly Rev. 1 82 It is propagated by cuttings or slips of the cane stalk, called rattoons.

1880 J. S. Cooper Coral Lands I. xviii. 213 When cut in March or April the ratoon canes are made to grow in cold dry weather.

1894 Pop. Sci. Monthly Feb. 493 The Jamaican reference to a meal made off the remnants of a previous feast as ‘eating the rattoons’.

1916 E. V. Wilcox Trop. Agric. vi. 46 In Java, most of the sugar cane crop is plant cane. In Louisiana, the crop is made up of plant cane and first rattoons.

1953 Sun (Baltimore) 15 May (B ed.) 5/5 The first crop [of sugar cane] is ordinarily harvested about eighteen months after planting. In most areas succeeding crops called ratoons, are obtained from a single planting before it is necessary to plow up the cane roots and replant.

1986 J. A. Samson Trop. Fruits (ed. 2) vi. 148 Banana and plantain... As with sugarcane and pineapple, the first sucker set in the field is called the ‘plant crop’, subsequent suckers are ‘ratoons’.