Day 131 - Sweet, sweet Cajun country

If you travel just 45 minutes by car to the west out of New Orleans, you'll probably be on the Cajun Highway--US 90. Pull off into Raceland and you'll be on the threshold of southern Louisiana's sugar cane country. The broad arc that sweeps from the Mississippi River across to Lafayette westward along this road is, more or less, the frontier between the crawfishing, shrimping and fishing bayous to the south and sugar cane country to the north.

This year, about 400,000 acres of the flat, marshy deltaic plain--about twice the size of NYC--is under cultivation for sugar cane in Louisiana. And around now, assuming the weather has been good to the farmers--wet early, dry later, bone-dry at the end--some 700 farmers will be riding their fields in combines shucking sunflower-high stalks of cane. In their wakes, dozens of egrets who have flown over from the bayous swoop in to catch insects and field mice dislodged from the stands of stalks.

The farmers make a bit of gamble: to wait as long as possible to begin harvesting without running out of time to finish cutting their 2500 or 5000 acres before a deep freeze settles in by late December or early January. The longer you wait to begin, the more sucrose accumulates in the cane. But the risk of losing a good deal of your crop to a freeze also increases. A few days of rain somewhere in between can delay harvesting for a week and increase the risk of missing the deadline even more. This year has been dry and warm.

The farmers will deliver some eleven- or twelve-million tons of shucked cane to a dozen sugar mills. The mills are industrial behemoths of rusting battleship-gray corrugated steel siding with steam-belching stacks seemingly from another era. They crush the cane to extract the sucrose-laden juice that, with some heat, spinning and chemistry, will become a million--perhaps one-and-a-quarter million--tons of raw sugar. That's just in Louisiana. Texas, Florida & Hawaii also grow cane. Sugar beets, which can grown in more temperate climates, can grow further north. Beet sugar is more prevalent than cane sugar these days. Both are dwarfed by corn syrups in the sweetener market.

I still have more to learn--including about price controls, the characteristics of the industry, etc. But I got to spend a pretty incredible day touring a sugar mill and meeting a few farmers, including Jessie Breaux, pictured below. He comes from an old Cajun cane-farming family who loves what they do and struggle a bit in an industry that continues to demand more and more cost savings through consolidation--but that's the challenge of all commodity farmers at the moment. He was working through Christmas Day this year, as all of his neighbors were, to take advantage of the late warmth and the great yield this year. "Santa will be riding his two-row," he told me with a weary smile. His two-row combine, that is.