By Colin Murphey Franklin Banner-Tribune
During this time of year in St. Mary Parish, the sugarcane industry is highly visible. From truck-after-truck lumbering down parish roads and highways, to combines chewing up row after row of towering cane stalks, to steam belching out from sugar mills and fields lit on fire, the cane industry is in full swing.
And while many St. Mary Parish residents may look forward to the end of the cane harvest and all the activity associated with the cane industry, what they may not know is the positive impact and lack of negative impact the industry actually has on the region.
“Sustainability” is defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as “a simple principle: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. To pursue sustainability is to create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations.”
And while “sustainability” has lately become a political catchphrase and one in danger of losing it’s meaning, the practice of living and working in harmony with the environment while providing for local communities is what residents of the parish are actually seeing on a daily basis, according to one local resident familiar with the industry.
Bret Allain and his family have been in the sugar business for generations. Allain said before there was manufacturing, before there was the energy industry in St. Mary Parish, it was sugar that allowed the region to prosper. And it continues today.
“For 220 years, this industry has been the mainstay of this whole region,” Allain said. “Way before you had oil and gas in the area, way before you had other industries, agriculture built these communities that you see now.”
Allain said not only does the sugar cane industry make a significant contribution to sustaining local communities economically, the plant itself is a part of the overall practice of sustainability. He said of all the things that could be grown in the fields of St. Mary Parish, sugarcane is by far the most environmentally friendly crop that can be produced.
“Sustainability is a very popular word today,” Allain said. “But we have been farming these fields and growing the same crops year after year. Sugarcane is called a C4 producer of oxygen. That plant will convert four times the amount of carbon dioxide to oxygen of anything else that could be growing on that property. There are other plants out there that come close but when you talk about taking carbon dioxide out of the air, it is the number one convertor of any crop out there by far. Of the CO2 we put into the air, we replace it with 10 times the oxygen.”
The sustainability of the sugarcane industry doesn’t stop with the plants in the field or local communities according to Allain. He said even the mill itself, located in Jeanerette, is operated according to the principle. Allain said one of the byproducts of cane processing is burned to power part of the operation.
“We are not a heavy consumer of energy here,” Allain said. “We can literally turn off the gas and turn off the electricity to this place and it could continue to operate for the next 90 days.”
Allain said one of the main misconceptions that he wanted to clear up about the cane harvest season was in regards to safety. Allain said great efforts are made to mitigate the hazards associated with increased amounts of heavy traffic on the roads of St. Mary Parish.
“We try to do our job as safely as humanly possible,” Allain said. “We have good conditions this year. It’s very dry so we aren’t bringing a lot of mud onto the road. We try to do our job as safely as we can, not just for the general public but for our own employees. We really take extra effort. We try not to leave debris on the road. We do try to be as neighborly as we can.”
Allain concluded by saying that the sugarcane industry, while a family business going back generations, was about more than just sustaining himself, his family, employees and his business.
“My family has made a living off the lands here for more than 200 years,” Allain said. “We take care of our land. We take that very seriously. We are stewards of the property just like my daddy always used to say, ‘We don’t actually own the land. We are stewards of it for a very short amount of time and it is incumbent upon us to do the best job that we can.’ Not only to provide a living for us and our families and the people that we employ but also for the community around us. We have produced this crop and harvested it and made it into sugar for the last 200 years. We are the ultimate in sustainability.”