Sugar Harvest: When the wagons roll, the mills grind

Story and Photos by
COLIN MURPHEY
Anyone who spends more than a passing moment in St. Mary Parish knows that sugar cane is one of the primary economic drivers in the area.
And if they drive anywhere in the parish, they probably can’t help but notice the really tall row after row after row of sugar cane growing in fields dotting the parish landscape.
But after all that cane is harvested, it has to go somewhere. And if the occasional smoke plume on the horizon doesn’t let everyone know that it’s harvest time, then the dozens and dozens of trucks lumbering down the highway and the scattered, broken stalks of cane along the roads of the parish are a sure giveaway.
So what does happen once all that cane is cut and loaded onto trucks? A lot of it ends up at the St. Mary Sugar Co-op in Sorrel. From there, the cane itself gets pummeled and punished several times over before it even closely resembles the stuff St. Mary Parish residents add to their coffee every morning or bake into the next festivities’ king cake.
A tour inside the mill facility at the co-op in Jeanerette is an assault on the senses….all of them. From the sweet (of course) smell wafting throughout the facility, the light dusting of sugary powder that leaves a slight film on ones’ arms to the sound of machinery pounding away at raw sugar cane and the sight of an 80 foot tall mound of unrefined sugar that uncannily resembles a certain mighty peak in the Himalayas, the operation at the mill is a dizzying array of sensory overload and an impressive display of technology combined with old world methodology.
While much of the mill is controlled by computer and innovation has made the job safer over the years, it still comes down to crushing and processing the raw sugar cane much the way it has been done for hundreds of years.
And according to St. Mary Sugar Co-op Vice President Bret Allain, for those hundreds of years, families in St. Mary Parish have been harvesting and processing sugar cane.
“We have a very long and proud history of producing sugar cane in this area,” Allain said. “For most farmers, it goes back many generations. You’ll find that many of the farming families have been doing it for a very long time. Way before there was an oil field or any other industry here, the industry here was sugar cane. We are still a major part of the local economy.”
Allain said the harvest this year has been fruitful in most respects. He also said the conditions for the harvest have been cooperating in terms of weather and that the tragic flooding the region experienced earlier in the year did not have a detrimental impact on the sugar cane industry in St. Mary Parish. He did say the impact of the flooding could still potentially be felt sometime in the future.
“Things are going well,” Allain said. “It’s always nice when it’s dry. It makes it a lot easier on the equipment and the guys in the field. It (flooding) did not really have much effect on the price. What it did effect was our ability to go in and plant for next year’s crop. We all had some fields that went underwater and that delayed our planting. The majority of the planting was done very late this year and so that’s more of an indicator for next year’s crop. But the impact on this year’s crop was minimal.”
One point Allain wanted to make sure people in the region are aware of during the harvest season and foremost in his mind with the increased amount of traffic on the roads especially with the holiday season just around the corner, was safety.
“Take caution around the sugar cane fields, particularly the backroads that we use to haul the cane,” Allain said. “We will look out for the public but we also ask that the public look out for our people. We always want to have a safe harvest. And we appreciate the cooperation that we get from the general public.”