Sugar Cane Harvest Season
The traditional Sunday ride with friends to the outlying areas around New Orleans offers welcome respite from the City for many long-time New Orleans residents. Destinations include Jean Lafitte State Park, Nottoway Plantation, Donaldsonville, and Grand Isle.
My friends Em, Brian and Hank like to head out to the hinterland together when there aren’t any important football games. After visting the usual haunts for the past many years, Brian now works on studying new routes, sometimes he finds little known hiking terrain. On these rides, Hank pulls snake spotting duty. I love hearing Em’s stories about a particular exploratory episode gone wacky.
When I tag along with them on these meandering adventures, we keep our eyes open for the produce guys by the side of the road so we can get some snap peas, sausage and other local culinary goodness. One of our more memorable excursions included a visit to Myrtle Plantation and a hop on the the ferry which crosses the Mississippi in St. Francisville. For those who know, there is always a man selling pralines while you wait to board the ferry. Even if you don’t fancy pralines, you’re compelled to buy a couple.
In the fall, these adventures include a unique aspect; the beauty of the graceful cane fields in contrast with the smoke which rises above the cane as harvest season begins in October and the fields are burned after the cane is cut. In the otherwise lazy countryside, sugar cane harvest season is a flurry of activity. While I have enjoyed this passively for years, I now have a personal tie to the sugar cane harvest that affords a closer perspective regarding the commercial end of the product of harvest season.
Some years ago, my sister took a job with a company called Quality Liquid Feeds, Inc. in Illinois, which brings her to New Orleans, periodically, on business. This is one of those eclectic jobs directly related to the our local commodity. Jen’s company brokers molasses which they purchase from Louisiana farmers. Her business card states, “Proudly made with 100% Louisiana Cane Molasses”. One of the local growers/processers she works with is the CoraTexas plant. I took a trip out to cane country recently and I pressed my sister to tell me more about what she does.
Jen coordinates the shipping of the molasses which they buy/sell and then transport to their customers via train and barge. The manufacturers who use it make, mostly, animal feed. Upon my pestering, she has showed me the complicated paper reports of what her shipping schematic looks like. She doesn’t think much of it but it’s a huge task to move molasses.
Molasses can only travel in clean cars/barges reserved for such content, this makes it even more challenging when she’s trying to fill the needs of molasses consumers across the world. In addition to the daily logistics, Jen has to know which rail cars are due to be taken out of service for their regular cleaning and maintenance. It takes a lot of knowledge of this little known system and she’s a master.
Jen is a busy mom and one of her daughters, is now attending Tulane. It’s nice to have another family member in the city taking advantage of a great opportunity, it connects us across the miles from here to Illinois. After even more nagging, Jen took some precious time to provide me with this techinical explanation of the scope of her job . . .
The sugar cane is cut and they run it thru the mills to desugarize the cane. Molasses is a byprodcut of sugar. Once they press the molasses and get the “juices” out, they get the byprodcut, blackstrap molasses. We ship molasses by rail and barges to our plants throughout the country. Our plants located in Wellsville, OH; LaSalle, IL; and Muskogee, OK, receive barges while our plants in Menomonie, WI; Dunlap, IA; Granger, WA; Casa Grande, AZ receive molasses by rail. Muskogee, OK receives both barges and railcars. We also have a plant located in Martin, MI and Belfield, MT. I feel as I am forgetting someone.
The molasses shipped to our Liquid Feed Manufacturing plants is our main ingredient for producing liquid feeds. The feed is sold to farmers, coops and other facilities as feed for horses, cattle, pigs and believe it or not we have even sold molasses to a Worm Farm!
Since more molasses is produced than we can use in our own facilities, we sell molasses to other customers and ship straight from the LA mills to customers by both truck and rail and they in turn use the molasses to manufacture their own feed, either liquid feed products or dry bagged feed products.
Worm farm?! Snakes? Gee, this could parallel a post on local politics.
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The sugar areas west and southwest of New Orleans are the areas where I am most at home — for a number of reasons. I look for excuses to go there, particularly in the fall and the spring, and thank you for helping to explain why. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who gets it.
Although I was born and schooled in the city, I spent most of my weekends and holidays not too far from the areas you travel. (Do you stop at Hymel’s along the way north? It’s my favorite thing to do when on the east bank by that way.) My favorite part of the year was always sugar cane harvest season, as it meant more relatives will be around, as my grandparents’ home was the closest to the refinery and our family’s equipment repair shop serviced it and the related cane companies. Good times. : )
Nice article on something I was thinking about this past week. I have a piece of sugar cane on my desk that I am going to cut up and plant in my backyard. I figure 4-5 stocks would look out of place but could be exotic next to my goldfish pond. Then I could have a harvest next fall. I can mircle grow them to see what happens. Sugar Cane is more than likely a better ethonal product than corn but Louisana has many fewer votes in congress than the midwest millionaire farmers.
One thing I lament on many occasions of these observational posts is that can’t capture the smell via photo, often a large part of the whole experience.