Sugar Crop.
The land-owner pays the men’s wages, and the cultivator gives them three meals a day and cigars.
The sugar-moulds (pilones) cost about 12½ cents each, and the cost is divided between the parties.
In making up the account, 6½ per cent. per annum is charged on the value of the land, machinery and building.
The molasses which drains from the sugar belongs to the land-owner.
These pilones are supposed to contain 140 lbs. of sugar when filled. They are placed upon a small pot to allow the molasses to drain off. When delivered their weight may be from 112 to 120 lbs. according to the time they have been draining. This sugar polarises about 80 per cent. according to circumstances and requires to be treated at the farderias in Manila to bring it up to an even sample before it is exported. The sugar loaves are cut up, sorted, crushed, mixed with other sugars, sun-dried, and a certain quantity of sand added before being put into bags for export as Manila Sugar, usually No. 7 or No. 9 Dutch standard. It will be seen from the above figures how moderate the expenses are. Of course each land-owner has a number of cultivators, and often a number of mills.
Notwithstanding the low price of sugar which has prevailed for many years, the provinces of Pampanga has made money out of it as the handsome houses of the land-owners in all their towns testify.
The sugar crop in Pampanga has never quite reached a million pilones, but has exceeded nine hundred thousand, say from fifty to sixty thousand English tons. The cane is crushed in small steam or cattle mills having three horizontal rollers.
These mills are mostly made in Glasgow and have now in Pampanga entirely superseded the Chinese mills with vertical rollers of granite or the native mills with vertical rollers of hard wood.[1]
A Farderia, or Sugar Drying and Packing Place.
[To face p. 240
In former years I pointed out, in a report written for General Jovellar, what a great advantage it would be to Pampanga if the planters would abandon the use of pilones and make sugar suitable for direct export and so obviate the manipulation in the farderias at Manila.
They could make a sugar similar to that produced in Negros and known as Ilo-ilo.
Now that the Philippines have passed into the hands of the United States, I do not doubt that central sugar factories will be established and will turn out centrifugal sugars polarizing 96 per cent. similar to the Cuban sugar.