Every year they burn sugarcane right across the street from where we live before harvesting it.   In South Florida, near Lake Okeechobee, sugarcane is grown commercially for the production of crystal or “white” sugar.  In years past, sugarcane was hand-harvested, using cane knives. Conversion to mechanical harvesting began in the mid-1980s, and by 1993 the entire South Florida sugarcane crop was harvested mechanically.  Fields are burned immediately before harvest. The fires are rather scary, but only last a short time; a 40-acre field burns in 15-20 minutes. Burning is done only in the daytime (through a permitting process with the Florida Division of Forestry), and only when dispersal of the smoke by air currents causes minimum nuisance.  After the sugarcane fields are burned, mechanical harvesters deposit the cut cane directly into field wagons. Four-wheel drive tractors haul 16 tons of cane out of the field with each four-wagon load. At special ramps near the field, the cane is dumped from the wagon into highway trailers or rail cars for transport to the mills. Rail cars carry 25-30 tons each. Highway trailers carry 20 tons per load.

First, I’ll show you photos from them burning the sugarcane yesterday across the street from my house.

The birds quickly evacuate the burning fields:

Yesterday they didn’t start cutting the sugarcane immediately after they burned it like they usually do.  For some reason they got a late start.  So they cut throughout the night.  Luckily it was so cold last night that we DIDN’T have our windows open, or else the noise from all those machines would have surely kept us awake!  I left the house this morning before the sun came up so I wasn’t able to get any photos of them harvesting, but I do have shots from years past…here’s a few of those:

What’ you’re viewing in the photo below is my front fence and gate.  You can see a man there on a trailer and he’s got something in his hand, it’s like a blow torch and he’s setting the sugarcane on fire as they drive by.

Here’s one of the trucks that go up and down the street to keep an eye on the fires as they are burning:

Here you can see one of the large machines that cut the sugarcane, dumping it into a trailer pulled by a tractor:

And another view:

This area is not near my house, but closer to town…here you can see a tractor pulling trailers full of fresh cut sugarcane to be loaded into train cars:

This train is taking a load of sugarcane to the mill in Clewiston, Florida:

Here’s what the sugarcane looks like before it’s cut:

I really like the cane before it’s burned and cut, it’s actually quite pretty!   Here’s a photo I took on December 31st, looking from my front gate across the street to the sugarcane:

Hard to believe that the photo above and the photo below are of the same place, huh?