SAE 1045 steel is widely used for manufacturing shafts in the sugar cane mills of the sugar industry. These shafts are designed with an expectation of a long lifetime. However, fatigue failures occur frequently. The sugar cane juice processed in these mills has corrosive properties that can alter the fatigue life of these shafts. In this research, the fatigue strength of SAE 1045 steel between 1 × 104 and 2 × 105 cycles in air and in sugar cane juice, with two different microstructures (tempered martensite at 300 °C and tempered martensite at 600 °C), was determined in rotating bending. The microstructure of the materials was characterized using optical microscopy, and the fracture surfaces were characterized using scanning electron microscopy. The results show that the fatigue strength at 2 × 105 cycles for the tempered condition at 600 °C decreases 7% because of the sugar cane juice effect, and for the tempered condition at 300 °C, the fatigue strength decreases 15%.