This past week’s freeze brought much hardship to many people across the Teche Area.

Water pipes froze. Water pressure dropped. Measures had to be taken to counteract the effects of the deep freeze we were in for most of the week as temperatures plunged well below 32 degrees.

Boil water advisories were issued for parts of Iberia Parish and Franklin. Officials in the area’s respective communities coped with Old Man Winter.

Unfortunately, the days of frozen weather came at an inopportune time for the area’s hard-working sugar cane farmers and those manning the sugar mills in the area. A few days before Christmas a local sugar cane farmer was optimistic about the extended finish to the harvesting and grinding season that, at the time, he labeled as “excellent.”

However, in the same breath, Juan Segura with Segura Farms, who planned to send sugar cane to the sugar mills until at least Jan. 15, said the one condition that would be detrimental to the finish was a hard freeze.

“We just hope we don’t get another bad freeze, which would hurt the crop. We don’t want a 27-degree or 26-degree freeze,” Segura said Dec. 21 in The Daily Iberian.

That’s what we just got, temperatures in the mid-20s.

Hopefully, the sugar cane crop wasn’t affected adversely. Those workers in the sugar cane fields, driving the tractors and trucks, and the men and women in the sugar cane mills have given a tremendous effort for more than three months and were on the verge of a record for sugar per acre, which was a little more than 8,400 pounds in 2012, according to Kenneth Gravois, sugar cane specialist with the LSU AgCenter.

The rare snowfall that blanketed the area Dec. 7 had minimal effect on the sugar cane crop,  according to a sugar mill general manager in Iberville Parish.

Sure, sugar cane in vast areas across the state bent under the weight of the snow. However, modern sugar cane cutters had little problem harvesting the affected sugar cane, Buckley “Buck” Kessler told the Plaquemine Post-South.

After the first two-thirds of the sugar cane harvest season went well weatherwise, according to Blair Hebert, Iberia Parish’s LSU AgCenter extension agent, the main glitch was a two-week period in which 7 inches of rain fell across the region. Sugar cane content in the stalks dropped “a little bit,” Segura said.

Segura and other sugar cane farmer looked forward to getting the last 20- to 30 percent of the crop out of the fields.

The recent freeze will have the final say on how the crop fares for 2017. For the sake of one of the main industries in the state and the many dedicated sugar cane farmers who are  a big part of each community, there will be less damage than anticipated.

DON SHOOPMAN

SENIOR NEWS EDITOR