HAULING CANE IN THE FIELDS, LOUISIANA
The steam engine was first employed in the crushing of cane in the year 1822. About this time, when slavery was such a tremendous factor in the South, sugar raising was marked by a tendency toward the large plantation method. From 1830 to 1840 the number of plantations in Louisiana decreased, but the number of slaves employed on them increased 40 per cent. Later, however, the plantations began to grow in number and by 1853 there were more than fifteen hundred of them, as against 668 thirteen years previous. In those days, each plantation had its own sugar mill, so that 1853 may be taken as close to the high-water mark for the number of mills in the South. With the outbreak of the Civil war, the industry was virtually wiped out of existence, and when its rehabilitation was begun, it was carried on along entirely different lines and the separation of the raising of sugar from the manufacture was gradually brought about. Year by year the small mills were abandoned and the crops of cane raised by the planters, large and small, were brought to the central factory to be worked up. Today, where large plantations still exist, it is the practice to rent subdivisions of land from twenty to fifty acres in size to tenants who grow cane for the central mill.
In 1880 there were 1144 small sugar mills in Louisiana and their output of sugar was 121,886 tons. In 1911, 187 mills handled a crop of 5,930,000 tons of cane which gave 308,439 tons of sugar, and this would have been considerably exceeded had it not been for a disastrous freeze. In 1880, 273 factories used horse power, in 1900 only 5, in 1905 none at all. The advent of the vacuum pan and the consequent abolition of the open-kettle method marked another great advance in manufacturing development. In 1880 about 42 per cent of the sugar produced in Louisiana was turned out by factories equipped with vacuum pans. The government statistics for 1909 show a total of 316,829 tons of sugar boiled in vacuum pans and only 3,678 tons of open-kettle sugar.
As has been said, the growing season for cane in Louisiana is limited and the harvesting is done before the plant has attained its full maturity. Whether or not this has any effect upon the flavor of the sugar and molasses produced is a moot point. It is none the less true, however, that the Louisiana “Clarifieds” and the so-called New Orleans molasses possess a flavor distinctively their own.
In the plantation fields, too, the scientists have worked wonders. To illustrate the benefit resulting from the application of modern methods to the cultivation of cane, in 1885 the average yield of cane per acre in Louisiana was about three-quarters of a ton, while in 1909 the average yield per acre in cane was about 20 tons, the recovery of sugar per ton of cane over 157 pounds, or 3140 pounds of sugar per acre.
The Louisiana state experiment station was established by the sugar planters at Audubon park, New Orleans, in 1885 and endowed for a term of years. This institution has grown in importance until at the present time it has ample grounds, well-equipped laboratories and a sugar house with an installation of the latest and best sugar-manufacturing machinery, all directed and operated by the students of the institution. Here is carried on the work of developing seedlings, improvement of cane varieties, investigation of cane diseases, together with the study of all questions of bettering plantation and factory methods.
The sugar production of Louisiana in long tons from 1860-61 to the present time is as follows: