RAISING CANE



St. John's mill during sugarcane grinding seasons

 The smell of smoke and boiling sugar lingers in the air. In Iberia and other parishes of Louisiana, it’s sugar cane grinding season, a season that begins in late September and ends in January. When I was associate editor of Acadiana Lifestyle, our sugar cane issue was published in January, and I learned a lot about sugar cane farming during the five years I wrote articles about this industry.

Recently, Acadiana Lifestyle celebrated its 25th anniversary, and I was asked to write a synopsis of my years with this journal. In one of the paragraphs I talked about the year I was sent to cover a story about a new sugar cane harvester. The assignment proved to be a challenge because on an overcast fall morning, I showed up in open-toed sandals with small heels and felt deep dismay when I was asked to follow the owner of the new machinery into a field near Jeanerette that had seen hard rain for several days. I sank into the ooze up to my ankles and stood for a half hour interviewing the owner and taking notes. When I returned to the Lifestyle office, I threw the ruined shoes in the door and told Art Suberbielle, the publisher, that he owed me a pair of shoes. But he only asked, “Did you get the story?”



Carts loaded with sugarcane

The new machine that I wrote about was called the Louisiana Two-row Green Cane Combine and originated with Walter Landry, then president of Agronomics, International, Inc. Lately, each time I pass a cane field in the parish, I wonder if the machine is currently being used to harvest cane. On that misty morning during grinding season in 1994, the large red harvester moved slowly through a field of cane, and the combine cut stalks of cane into 13-inch billets before extracting leaf from the cane, which was sucked through the extractor to be deposited back on top of the soil. At that time, the machine could cut 75 tons of sugar cane per hour and was put through its paces on the kind of day sugar cane farmers detest. Light rain fell on us as we watched the machine at work, and black mud oozed onto the roads between the sugar cane fields.

The scene was a far cry from the day of cane cutting by hand when slaves cut cane with special knives that resembled a machete with a hook on the end. The slaves had to lop off the top of the stalk, then cut the cane from the roots at the level of the ground. Other workers loaded the stalks on two-wheeled carts to move them to the sugar house or mill. During wet fall seasons, those heavily-loaded carts created a muddy mess on the farm roads.



Acres of cane near New Iberia, LA

The demonstration of the new harvester fascinated me. By extracting the leaf and putting it back into the soil, the machine assured that cane would no longer need to be burned, and organic matter would be returned to enrich the soil. A directional loading device on top of the machine placed cane into a container, which enabled cane to be loaded at any point in the field.

As I watched the huge machine, two other demonstrations began – one of a transport system and fork lift, the brainchild of J. Randolph Roane – and another piece of transport equipment that originated with Agronomics International, Inc. The transport systems were developed to transport billeted and full stalk cane to nearby sugar mills. These harvesting systems were touted to be a boon to the sugar industry as they had been designed for Louisiana conditions and would increase sugar recovery by reducing the need for field burning of cane and improving cane transport (at the time huge carts behind tractors were the major means of transporting sugar cane to the mill).



Crop for next year

Since I have no occasion to trek into the sugar cane fields, I’m curious to know if the harvesters are used today. If burning of cane residue has been reduced, brava! I think I missed the pre-harvest burn, if it occurred, but post-harvest burns are also part of the process yet to come! Right now, there’s still enough dust and smoke in the air to inspire a good case of sneezes, which I’m presently undergoing.
However, far be it from me to complain about an industry that moves about 14 million tons of sugar cane on some of our corduroy roads to Louisiana mills. According to reports from the American Sugar Cane League, the sugar cane industry has an annual impact of $1.1 billion in Louisiana. The industry has moved a long way from the early 1800’s when farmers turned to sugar production following Etienne Bore’s development of a process for making sugar, and Teche country became a major player in the burgeoning industry.

PRODUCING YOUR OWN FOOD

Gary Entsminger and
home-grown produce

Many times when I receive an email from Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado, he’s up to his neck in salsa verde or canning peaches, jams, applesauce, or other home-grown or local fruits or vegetables. His produce is usually fresh from a garden planted and tended by him and his partner, Susan Elliott, a painter and botanist, or comes from farmers in the valley below them. Both Gary and Susan are vegetarians, so when they moved into their cabin, a garden seemed an inevitable ingredient for their lifestyle.

Invariably, Gary’s e-mails arrive near supper time, and I find myself salivating over his descriptions of the salsa or sauces he and Susan are brewing in their kitchen. Since Susan is also an herbalist and knows her seasonings, the spices that are part of their recipes remind me of those in Indian and Iranian food.

I asked Gary to follow up the garden articles for which Susan supplied the texts on two of my blogs by giving me an interview about producing and canning food at home, and he supplied enough material for two blogs, which I’ll pass on to anyone who’s interested in the hot topic of sustainability.

Gary and Susan live in a rustic cabin on the Uncompahgre plateau near Montrose, Colorado year-round and balance their work of publishing books and periodicals/selling rare and second-hand books with hiking, playing musical instruments, growing and canning food. Gary dubbed this piece a “wee spiel,” but he supplies enough information to titillate anyone interested in learning to live “off the land” year-round.

Here’s the interview:

Moore: What prompted you to begin growing your own food?

Entsminger: That’s a long story. So perhaps I should just describe a problem that American consumers have when it comes to food – 1) grow and preserve food themselves, or 2) buy from someone else. Often, the buying means from a supermarket (or a restaurant). It’s probable that any food bought in a supermarket has traveled a long distance. Some estimate that the average tomato travels 1000 miles to get to a consumer. Since most food in supermarkets comes from California, Florida, Mexico, or further (e.g., many apples come from New Zealand) and especially in winter, the 1000 miles sounds accurate enough, and transporting food is expensive. Also foods harvested for transportation are usually picked earlier and are sometimes genetically manipulated for longer shelf-life. & there’s the pesticide issue.

Moore: What about pesticides and supermarket fruits and vegetables?

Entsminger: Well, you’ve heard of the Dirty Dozen?

Moore: You mean the movie?

Entsminger:  Yes, and the produce. Researchers have determined that some fruits and vegetables contain more pesticide residues than others. Those are the Dirty Dozen. Here’s a list I saw recently: apples, celery, sweet bell peppers, peaches, strawberries, nectarines, grapes, spinach, lettuce, cucumbers, blueberries, and potatoes.

Moore: Ouch. Those are some of my favorites!

Gary digging in garden

Entsminger:  Mine too. But there are alternatives. You can buy organically produced fruits and vegetables or grow your own.

Moore: So you and Susan decided to avoid supermarket fruits and vegetables by starting a garden?

Entsminger. Not exactly. Like everyone else, our diet would be quite restricted without supermarkets. But we’re trying to work around the inefficient mess of conventional farming and consumer dependence on whatever the conventional farmer and supermarket provides. An alternative is to grow the food yourself or buy locally. In most parts of the U.S., it’s still possible to grow a garden during the warmer months, and if you grow a garden, the logical follow-up is to preserve the food from your garden for winter. This was how my parents’ and grandparents’ generations went about it. There was no question of buying your winter fruits and vegetables in a supermarket since in my part of rural Virginia there were no supermarkets nearby until at least the 1950s.

Moore: My godfather used to say that the U.S. ended in the 1950s, but perhaps it was earlier for people who wanted fresh foods! However, there is a growing trend toward sustainability and people making home gardens.

Entsminger: Yes, but as with everything, there are trade-offs. For example, how to preserve the nutrition in fruits and vegetables when you store, can, freeze, etc. food for winter. There’s no question that nutrition in any fruit or vegetable begins to degrade as soon as it’s picked. Thus, a tomato that travels by truck from California to Colorado has been losing some of its nutrition along the way, and when most fruits and vegetables are heated they lose some of their nutrition. Unless you’re picking the fruit from your garden and eating it raw soon after, you’ve already begun to lose some nutrition. So, which trade-offs are preferable? The best scenario Susan and I have found is similar to the one our ancestors used:

1.                Grow what you can.

2.                Buy locally when you can.

3.                Preserve what you can from your garden or local sources.

4.                Eat what’s in season.

5.                Buy in supermarkets as a last resort.

6.                Avoid growers using pesticides.

Moore: How do you preserve food?

Susan Elliott and onlookers

Entsminger: We preserve by canning or sun-drying, and we store root vegetables (potatoes, beets, onions, garlic) in cool areas. Root cellars are ideal. Apples can also be stored all winter if kept in a cool place. My parents had a cellar where we kept a winter’s supply of apples, potatoes, and onions. We grew the potatoes and onions, and we bought the apples from a local orchard. Susan and I are also experimenting with other methods as well, but we rarely freeze produce because of the energy it requires to maintain a freezer. This too is a trade-off because frozen foods can retain a bit more of their nutrition.

Part II of the interview with Gary Entsminger about Producing Your Own Food will be featured in a subsequent blog.

Photographs by Susan Elliott and Gary Entsminger

SOME CHATTER ABOUT CLABBER

Grandpa Paul – Clabber enthusiast & 
grandchildren not so fond of the drink

Yesterday morning after preaching a Pentecost sermon at St. Mary’s, the Episcopal Convent here on the bluff at Sewanee, Tennessee, I went into the refectory to breakfast with the congregants and Sisters and got into a conversation with Henry Hamman, publisher of Plateau Press. Henry had begun searching for his wife Kathy because he said that he had to get home and build a fence around his tomato plants – the ubiquitous deer on the Cumberland Plateau had been sniffing around his garden. I immediately went into a déjà vu about homegrown products; namely, the tomatoes that my Grandfather Paul used to grow in his backyard at Franklinton, Louisiana (the town where I was born)… and the memory lengthened into one about supper feasts in the “country.”

When I visited my grandparents during summers of the 40’s, the supper table often contained simple fare of thick slabs of Big Boy tomatoes, sliced cucumbers that I helped my grandfather pick, butterbeans left from lunch and warmed up, fried cornbread, and clabber. My grandfather’s supper consisted of only a tall green glass filled with clabber and crumbled cornbread, a concoction he drank throughout the summer.

At the age of nine, my appetite centered more on the vegetables than the strange concoction Grandfather Paul drank because I thought that clabber was a medicinal food he endured as a remedy for his condition of Bright’s Disease. Years later, I tasted clabber and agreed with the moniker it acquired through the Ulster Scots in the Appalachians – that of “bonny clabber.”

Clabber is simply curdled milk, or unpasteurized milk that has been allowed to turn sour at a specific temperature -- room temperature. As the milk curdles it develops into yogurt-like consistency. In this age of pasteurized milk regulations, the drink isn’t too popular anymore, and the pasteurization process kills the bacteria necessary for it to sour. The closest we can get to a clabbered drink is buttermilk. I’m told that if you heat clabber a little, the curds in it separate and become cheese.

Some farmers use clabber to feed their chickens as it provides calcium and protein for the chickens – the farmers claim that if chickens are fed this concoction, their meat is softer and they become better layers.

I have no idea where my grandfather got his raw milk because he didn’t own cows, but Washington Parish abounds in dairy farms, and he may have obtained milk from the owner of a cow that grazed on an open lot on 10^th Avenue in Franklinton, one that I skirted on the way to visit my Aunt Kathryn who lived about a block away from the cow. I’d get off the sidewalk and wade through weeds to avoid the harmless cow who kept her head lowered and had no interest in a frightened, nine-year old girl. My mother had a phobia about cows and passed on the fright to me, along with fear of lightning, tramps, and a host of other senseless anxieties. A contradiction to this phobia was my liking for the verse in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse about the “friendly cow, all red and white/I love with all my heart…”

A few decades ago, perhaps a thousand dairy farms abounded in Washington Parish, and I understand that today there are less than two hundred; however, the three parishes of Tangipahoa, St. Helena and Washington parishes have the largest concentration of dairy farms in Louisiana. I don’t know how much of the milk is used for curdling purposes, but in many rural areas, people still enjoy their milk soured to the stage of a firm curd. Remember the old nursery rhyme, “Little Miss Muffet /sat on her tuffet/ eating her curds and whey?”

I recently read an article highlighting Russel Creel, who owns a dairy farm five miles east of Franklinton. Creel received the title of “Dairyman of the Year” from the LSU Dairy Science Club (once known as the Cow and Cream Club!), and I bet he knows how to make a good bowl of clabber since he has been in the dairy industry for over forty years.

By the way, clabber can be eaten with brown sugar, nutmeg, or molasses. However, my grandfather was a purist and ate it unsweetened, flavoring it only with fried cornbread (no sugar added). A Greenlaw, of Scots lineage, Grandfather Paul thought it was “bonny clabber.”

RICE TALK

Marquart homestead in Lake Arthur, Louisiana

While we enjoy cool nights and mild temperatures during the day here on the Cumberland Plateau, friends in New Iberia, Louisiana, my second home, tell me they’re experiencing warmer temperatures at night in Cajun Country. One of the bad aspects of warm night temperatures in Acadiana is the effect that they have on the rice crops, which are a large part of the agricultural economy in this part of the U.S.

According to news passed on to me by friends, rice farmers are already facing low market prices, and last year they had to struggle with too much salt in fresh water used to flood their rice fields. This year, the night temperatures of 60 – 65 degrees in early April, awaken bacterial panicle blight, which infects the flowering parts of the plant and abort kernel formation. According to an article in The Teche News, when bacteria overtake the plant, it destroys the grain, and the farmer does not notice this infection until the plant reaches a height of a few inches. If the days are hot, a plant has to use more energy to produce photosynthesis, but at night it normally rests and the cooler the nights, the better the plant grows. If nights are warm, the rice plant is not able to relax, and this stress triggers the bacterial panicle blight in seed. The article concludes with the startling words: “There is no chemical on the market to kill the panicle blight.”

Rice at every meal

Now, rice is not only part of Acadiana’s agricultural economy, it’s a staple on the average south Louisianian’s table. It is said that Cajuns eat anything with rice – gumbo, gravy, rice dressing, rice pudding – the dishes are myriad and delicious. The latest joke in Cajun Country about rice, and its accompanying sauce or gravy, features, of course, Boudreaux and Thibodeaux. Boudreaux and Thibodeaux are walking through the woods one day when a flying saucer lands near them. A door opens, and two little green aliens climb down out of the spacecraft. Thibodeaux asks Boudreau, “Mais, look at dat. What you tink dat is?” Boudreaux, aiming his shotgun at the space critters, tells him, “Thibodeaux, I don’t know, but you hurry back to de camp and start making a roux and put on a pot of rice.”

Rice in Acadiana is usually rotated with pasturage for cattle every second or third year. The crop has been grown by farmers along levee lands since 1719, according to Malcolm Comeaux, writing in The Cajuns, Essays on Their History and Culture. When grown on the prairielands of south Louisiana, it was called “providence” rice as the success of the crop depended upon rain or watering by Providence. The early settlers on the prairie planted rice in coulees and ponds, and it was cut, threshed and hulled with primitive tools. During the late 19th century, rice production was revolutionized. Midwesterners turned it into a highly mechanized venture, using pumps, harvesters, threshers, and gangplows. Comeaux explains that except for the fact that the farmers at that time were growing rice, it “was literally an extension of the wheat belt into South Louisiana.”

My Great-grandfather Samuel Marquart, a farmer in Fontenelle, Iowa, brought a band of Midwesterners to south Louisiana and formed a land company with his brothers, buying the land on which the town of Lake Arthur stands. At one time, he and his brothers owned the entire town, and he made a large profit from land sales. He also had land near Lake Arthur that he thought would be good for rice production, and after my grandfather Emerson Lavergne married Leila Vincent and had three sons, Emerson and Leila left their teen-aged sons to fend for themselves while they tried to establish a rice farm. Unfortunately, The Depression caused the farm’s demise, and the failed rice venture became the legend of my grandfather’s career as a farmer. I remember him as a short, bald-headed man sitting in a cracked leather recliner in the dining room of my grandmother’s boarding house operation, reading or smoking a pipe, and rising from the chair only to shop for groceries for the boarders’ meals, or to do an occasional plumbing job. He seldom spoke to anyone except my father when we visited, and my father later spoke of him as one of the victims of a rice crop failure and The Great Depression.

One of the successes in rice history is the Conrad Rice Mill in New Iberia, Louisiana, the oldest rice mill in the U.S. Originally built in 1914, it’s an example of a factory that uses a belt-driven power transmission. P.A. Conrad founded this company in 1912, calling it the Conrad Rice Mill and Planting Company. He cut rice by hand and allowed it to sun dry on levees before placing the rice in threshers, after which the rice was put into one-hundred pound bags and taken to the mill. The business grew steadily, and Conrad began to package rice in smaller bags. Mike Davis purchased the mill in 1975 and has steadily improved the operation, as well as expanded the rice inventory. The old mill still produces fine quality rice that is marketed worldwide.

I am hoping for cooler nights in Cajun Country so that the crop that contributes to south Louisiana’s economy as well as provides an important part of Cajun meals can escape the bacterial panicle blight. Mais, Boudreaux and Thibodeaux need their pot of rice for exotic stews and gumbos!