Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida

Alec Wilkinson., “Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida” Alfred A. Knopf, 1989,  261 pp.

I read this book because it involves an employer in Clewiston, Florida, close to where we live.  The employer, U.S. Sugar Corporation, in 1942, was indicted for enslaving the black American cane-cutters working on their Florida plantations.  In this present book, New Yorker writer Wilkinson, investigates current employment practices at U.S. Sugar, despite company obstructionism and sugar-cane cutters' fear of talking.  The author reveals that the growers, protected by the sugar lobby still treat 10,000 West Indian, mainly Jamaican, cutters like slaves (at least in 1989 when the book was written). The author describes cane growing, burning and harvesting, which he declares to be the most dangerous work in the U.S., and forcefully portrays the cutters' seven-day weeks of filthy and exhausting labor, ill-paid on a piece-rate basis, 

US Sugar Corporation is a large privately owned agricultural business based in Clewiston, Florida. The company farms over 187,858 acres of land in the counties of Hendry, Glades, and Palm Beach. It is the largest producer of Sugar Cane in the United States, producing over 700,000 tons per year, close to 8 percent of the nation’s sugar.

My Notes:

Pg. 6:  Most of the sugar-cane acreage, as well as all seven of the mills, lie within Hendry and Palm Beach counties, in fields outside the towns of Pahokee, Bell Glade, South Bay, Clewiston, and Moore Haven. 

Pg. 20:  A peculiarity of the harvest of sugar-cane is the burning of the fields the day before cutting. 

Pg. 48:  A cutter is expected to cut eight tons of sugar-cane a day, which the majority can do in six hours.  As an approximate rule, there is a ton of cane to every three hundred feet of cut row.  An accomplished cutter may earn as much as six or seven dollars an hour.  (P. 102)

Pg. 70:  Approximately one hundred and thirty-five farmers grow sugar cane in South Florida.  The five largest are corporations. 

Pg. 79:  It is possible that the government support of sugar prices costs Americans three billion dollars a year in the form of higher prices for candy bars and ice cream and salad dressings and canned soups and vegetables and cereals and all the other products that contain sugar.  The sugar lobby represents two thousand growers of sugar cane and ten thousand growers of sugar beets. 

Pg. 156:  The most likely moment for a punishing freeze is the full moon of February.  Serious freezes seem to occur in cycles of nine years.  Unless the freeze is particularly severe, the cane does not perish.  As a rule, however, a grower has thirty to forty days following a freeze to get all his cane at a profit. 

Addenda:

Latest info concerning sugar cane around Clewiston from Newspaper article:

March 31, 2015

HOMESTEAD, Fla. - With the passage of Amendment One in the November election, Florida now has the funds to protect the Everglades and the state's water supply. But now, state lawmakers appear to be losing their resolve to purchase the land the sugar industry agreed to sell in 2010.

The contract between the U.S. Sugar Corporation and the state to buy the land expires in October 2015. By purchasing the land, the state could build a reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee to contain polluted waters generated by the sugar industry, and keep them from flowing into the Everglades.

According to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Everglades has shrunk to less than half of its original size, a process the NRDC says has been accelerated by the sugar industry. Filer says maintaining the Everglades' health is key to the health of Florida's economy, people and wildlife.

"There are two critical issues at stake here," says Filer. "One is the Everglades are a national treasure and we have a responsibility to do everything we can to protect it. The other is about one in three of us gets our drinking water directly from the Everglades. So there are both practical and other reasons to make sure we do everything we can to get this right."