Recent rains a mixed bag for parish’s sugar cane farmers

A recent pattern of rainy days in Vermilion Parish has been both a blessing and a curse for sugar cane farmers in the parish.
Vermilion Parish sugar cane farmer Erroll Domingues said that June was very dry and hot. The rain was welcomed “as far as getting rid of the drought and getting us the growth we need in the crop, but at the same time, the planting needs to be underway for next year’s crop, and it’s delaying that substantially,” he said.
Some farmers haven’t started planting yet, while others have been able to plant anywhere from 5 percent to a third of their crop, depending on the conditions they’re seeing, said Domingues, who also serves as a Vermilion Parish police juror. The dry weather earlier this summer stunted the crop some, but for the most part, the crop has rebounded in the parish, he said.
“There are some areas that went all of July without rain,” he said, keeping those areas from rebounding
completely. For most of the parish’s 40,000-plus acres of sugar cane, though, “the crop has responded well, and it looks to be an average crop, for the most of Vermilion.”
The rain may be inconvenient for most people, but it hits sugar cane farmers in the bottom line, according to LSU AgCenter Extension Agent Blair Hebert. He said that the state now has more than 450,000 acres of sugar cane crops but has not had a new processing mill built in years. The newest sugar cane mill in the state was built in the mid 1960s, he said.
That means that the more acres are yielding well — as this year’s crop promises — the harder it becomes to move things around because of a late harvest. The rule of thumb is that mills operate from Oct. 1-Jan. 10, he said. After Jan. 10, the chance of freezing weather increases, so mills would rather push the start of the harvest earlier rather than get caught in a freeze.
Domingues, 50, has been in farming since he was 17, he said. His great-grandfather had been a farmer, and Domingues’ father took over the farm in 1964. When his father retired due to an illness, Domingues and his brother and uncle restarted sugar cane farming in 1986.
For now, dry weather will be needed for four or five days to give farmers a chance to start planting next year’s sugar cane crop. Unfortunately, he said, the 10-day forecast calls for similar conditions, with a 50 percent chance of rain. As a result, planting conditions have to be very dry — moist ground but not wet, he said.
Domingues said the best case scenario, if the weather forecasts hold true, is to start planting around Sept. 7 or 8, and begin harvesting around Sept. 25-27. After that, harvesting continues until early January. Cane farmers could plant into October and still have a successful crop, he said, but it would be better to do it sooner.
“That’s where it’s going to really rough on growers if we’re not done, to try to harvest and plant at the same time,” Domingues said.
“We need dry weather from today. We need 30 days of dry weather, the industry does.”
Ideally, farmers would have the next crop planted before harvesting the current crop. However, because they use the same equipment for both harvesting and planting, doing both means that only half the time could be spent on either task that normally would be spent on it under normal harvesting conditions after planting has been done.
Hebert said that’s the dilemma for farmers having their planting days pushed back into harvest time. Depending on the mill’s schedule, farmers must get the harvest to the mills mid-day or late in the day. If it’s mid-day, the farm must harvest in the morning, then spend time changing equipment for afternoon planting. If deliveries to the mill are late in the day, they spend the morning planting, then change over equipment for afternoon harvesting.
But all that is determined by the weather, and the fields being dry enough to plant during the window farmers have.
“We can’t control mother nature, we have to work with her,” Hebert said.
There’s a roughly 60-day window — August and September — to plant, and farmers typically need three good weeks to plant. At this point, there have only been four or five days through the first 28 days of August available for most farmers to plant
“Where they should be at 50 percent (planted), a lot might be at 15 or 20 percent now,” Hebert said. “Some places, it’s not 10 percent.”
The silver lining, he said, is it looks like this year’s crop will be a good one.
Domingues also said that muddy fields don’t prevent farmers from harvesting their sugar cane crops, but they make it more difficult, and 30 percent more expensive. Muddy harvests also affect the parish’s drivers because tractors and trailers track mud on the roadways, which farmers do not like to see.
“It makes it hard on the public, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “One of my biggest worries is the inconvenience on the public and the public perception with the mud on the roads. Everybody tries to do the best that they can. Some go above and beyond, and some don’t. The ones that don’t give a bad name to the ones that do.
“My biggest worry about a muddy harvest is the inconvenience to the public.”
He said that even his wife, to whom he’s been married for 26 years, isn’t happy when the roads are muddy because of sugar cane harvests in wet conditions.
Domingues said cane farmers are conscious of trying not to muddy roads during harvesting.
“When we harvest in this mud, it’s not what we want to do, and we do our best not to do it,” he said.