A Sweet Tooth for Success

By Patrice Doucet  |  Photo By Lee Ball

As you stir sugar into your morning coffee or satisfy your sweet tooth this month, which is Sugar Cane Month, ponder the history and continued success of one of the oldest sugar refineries in the U.S. and the merger that saved Acadiana’s sugar industry.

Before Colonial Sugars, before the Domino Sugar Refinery, there was the St. John Sugar Mill in St. Martinville, a refinery built before 1862 by the Alexander DeClouet family and then acquired in 1895 by a sugar cane farmer in Plaquemine, JB Levert.  To attain more land and keep production viable, the refinery was sold to growers in 1974, forming the St. Martin Sugar Cooperative, which by the late 1800s was producing 450,000-500,000 tons of sugar.

Around the same time, the Breaux Breaux Sugar Co-op had a small mill producing 200,000-250,000 tons of sugar and a membership of five or six farming families.  With need for more land, they were recruiting young farmers, many of them soy bean farmers, to grow more cane in the Breaux Bridge area.

Hit by the historical “100-year freeze” in 1989, the crops of 1990 produced only 160,000 tons of cane between the St. Martin and Breaux Bridge mills.

There was not enough cane tonnage to continue a profitable operation in Breaux Bridge, so in ’91 and ‘92 the Breaux Bridge mill was used as a loading site, trucking the cane to St. John at night because the mill was too far a distance for Breaux Bridge farmers to travel by tractor.  

Dane Berard, co-owner of Southland/B & T Farms and Treasurer of LASUCA, has farmed soy beans since 1973 and sugar cane since 1980.  He remembers those years as hard times for farmers, struggling to make ends meet and planting soy beans to diversify. “It took every farmer until the 1992 crop to get back on their feet,” he says.

Berard says instead of putting renovations into the smaller Breaux Bridge mill, it was shut down and the St. Martin Sugar Co-op compensated farmers to buy more equipment to haul the crops to St. John.  With the merger of the Breaux Bridge Sugar Co-op and the St. Martin Sugar Co-op, the Louisiana Sugar Cane Co-op (LASUCA) was formed.  It was the only merger of two sugar mill co-ops in the history of Louisiana’s sugarcane industry.

 

Today, LASUCA farms approximately 5,000 acres and plants 1,200 acres a year, according to board member Charlie Levert, who is a 6th generation sugar cane farmer and great, great grandson of JB Levert. 

One of 14 board members, Levert says two of the most important decisions made by the board include expansion to increase capacity and when to begin harvest, which is based on farmers’ estimated tonnage and when planting is finished.

This year, Levert says grinding season is tentatively scheduled for September 20, depending on how planting goes.  “We start harvest usually the week after farmers are finished planting the next crop,” he explains.

Since 2016, LASUCA has added new members, many of them soy bean farmers who are adding cane to their crops.  “We had a group of growers, with a depressed grain market and a vision to increase diversity, wanting to get into cane,” says LASUCA Ag Division Manager John Hebert.  “They contacted us and we educated them on the crops.  The following year the same thing happened with more growers, and because of this influx of cane growers we are increasing the capacity of the mill.” 

 

There are currently 48 growers who belong to LASUCA, hailing from Iberia to Rapides Parishes and Point Coupee to Vermilion, with some newer growers from St. Landry, Rapides and Avoyelles Parishes.

“With a growing number of farmers, we had to make big changes to increase our capacity.  We plan on going from processing 12,000 tons of cane a day to approximately 19,000 tons a day by 2020,” Levert says.

LASUCA General Manager Mike Comb says they are in the first year of a five-year expansion plan saying, “We’ll plan to upgrade every station of the factory by 2021.  Currently, we’re installing a new continuous vacuum pan and evaporator, and upgrading one boiler – and we’re building two new boillers.  In fact, we’re in the engineering and foundation stages of that now with the goal of completing them by September of 2020.  Also, to handle the added capacity, we’re preparing the foundation for a second line of mills.”   (Mills are actually the area where the cane is accepted, prepared and squeezed for juice).

With all of these additions to the refinery, Comb projects that the total cane supply will increase to 1,750,000 tons by 2022, compared to 1,150,000 tons before the new members came onboard a year or so ago.

St. John is among five of the 11 mills statewide that has its own harvesting division with its own employees and harvesters, supplying tractors and fuel while also maintaining the equipment.  “We cover every aspect of the harvesting and transportation process,” says Comb.   “There’s less capital investment to the grower and it affords new growers the opportunity to get into the cane business.  For the mill, it provides a better opportunity to manage logistics.  If growers had to invest in a $300,000 harvest and $150,000 in wagons, sugar cane would not be an option for them.”  

Hebert agrees that it’s a more efficient use of capital and harvesting equipment because they’re “harvesting more tons per use of that equipment than the average farmer would be able to.” 

In the 2017-’18 season, LASUCA produced 1,310,070 tons of cane, which was ground into roughly 317 million pounds of sugar.

 

Comb says the refinery’s surplus of bagasse, the pulp that remains after the cane is crushed, provides 90 percent of the fuel from which the mill runs, just as it has done for the past 200 years.  “We’ve been ‘green’ before it was ever a term,” he chuckles.  He adds that the refinery doesn’t consume water, but rather produces more than enough for their needs.

While LASUCA’s sustainability efforts may have gone unnoticed by many for years, their community contributions and involvement have not.  In 2017, the St. Martin Parish Government recognized LASUCA’s relief efforts after the co-op helped flood victims in Stephensville by sending pumps to the area.  This year, LASUCA and its growers were honored for their hard work and contributions to the local economy with the Breaux Bridge Chamber of Commerce’s Business of the Year award.

 “Everything we’re doing is to be provide increase revenue and higher returns to our members – cane growers and land owners alike- while being responsible members of the community,” says Comb.