Cookin' on Hwy 1

By Tim Acosta, Advertising & Marketing Director

As I write this, I’m sitting in my backyard looking out at a field high with sugarcane. If you live in Lafourche, Terrebonne, Vermilion, Iberia, Iberville, Lafayette, St. Mary, Assumption, or any of the other Louisiana parishes where sugarcane is grown — there are 24 sugar parishes — you are surrounded by cane.

Louisiana’s warm climate is perfect for growing sugarcane. Most years, Louisiana produces more than 15 million tons of sugarcane, which yields about 16 million tons of raw sugar.

At Rouses Markets, we have our own brand of sugar. It is 100% Louisiana sugar, grown by Louisiana farmers.

I grew up in the cane fields. My dad has been a sugarcane farmer all of his life. His dad was a sugarcane farmer. And when I wasn’t in school, my dad would put me to work in the cane field. In the spring, my job was to break the stubble, which is the below-ground portion of the stalk left in the field after harvest. You plant a new crop of cane in late summer, early fall. It was one my jobs to walk the rows of sugarcane after planting, to fill in any gaps that were missed.

Grinding season, the annual harvest, starts in October when the temperatures begin to drop. It runs right up until Christmas — sometimes longer, depending on the weather. Weather is the biggest factor for farmers, no matter what they grow.

Farming is more modern now, but when I was a young boy, they planted cane by hand, and there were a lot more steps to getting the crop out. During grinding season, my Uncle Bobby would run the cane cutter (now it’s called a harvester). He’d cut the cane and lay it in heaps on top of the rows. I would drive a tractor hauling a wagon or two to help collect the cane and move it to the transfer loader. My parrain, Pookie, ran the front-end loader, which loaded the cane onto cane trucks. The farmers would then haul the cane to South Coast Sugar Mill, which was right there in Raceland, and is still there today. The mill would weigh and shred the sugarcane, and crush it to extract the juice.

On hot days I would chew on stalks of raw sugarcane. It would quench my thirst while we worked. But the best stalks were cut in November and December. Cool weather and frost raise the sugar content in the cane, so it is sweeter then. November and December are deer hunting season, and we’d hunt in the field after the farmers shipped their limit on cane. My son, Nick, often meets my dad in the field weekends this time of year.

Farming roots run deep in my family. The Acostas are descendants of the Canary Islands which is in the southernmost region of Spain, where sugarcane was once cultivated. I had cousins in New Iberia on my mom’s side, and we always went to the Louisiana Sugarcane Festival there. It seemed like it took forever to get there on old Hwy. 90.

Hurricane Ida damaged over 118,000 acres of Louisiana sugarcane. Luckily, there was no serious damage to the sugar mills. But cane that’s knocked down can rise again — and so can people. Grinding season is in full swing right now, and will be even bigger next year.