2010-11-24 Sugar on Fire

Nope, that's not a brush fire in the distance. It's a sugar cane field being harvested.


I grew up in a sugar town and in a sugar family, so please, next time you see me, let's have discussion about sugar production!

Anyway, I saw this out in the distance and thought I would share what the skies looked like every fall as the sugar workers would go out into the fields and set them on fire in a controlled burn. The smell, a mixture of burned vegetation and caramel, permeated the air. Sometimes if the field was especially close to the house, a light snow of ashes would rain down through the air.

Once the field was burned, the men would move into the fields with machetes and pile up the giant stalks of cane onto the trucks. The trucks trundled their way into town to dump their contents into the never-ceasing mill. On the other side of the process, a huge warehouse began to fill to bursting with 2-story mounds of fresh brown sugar.