Sugar cane harvesting is just starting to ramp up to high-gear. This weekend we drove by the refinery that is to the north of town and saw 50+ semi trucks filled with sugar cane. The down side to this is that a lot of farmers burn the fields as part of the harvesting process, which makes the air quality awful here.
I walked out of the house on a nice sunny day last week, and noticed little bits of black floating to the ground nearby, when I went to look at one closer, it was clearly a bit of charred husk. Then after that the soot got really bad. I was burning some DVDs for the sisters, and after leaving one of them on the coffee table for an hour, it had a whole bunch of black flecks on it. I’m expecting that we’ll have to do a lot of cleaning over the next few weeks.
Then the other night right before sunset, we saw our first big plume from a fire somewhere west of town. We went up to the top of the Institute to take some pictures of it…here’s the best one (click for full resolution):
I also took a short video of it:
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Also on Youtube
I wonder why field burning is a necessary part of the harvest.
It burns off the leaves and leaves the stalk behind for picking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane#Cultivation
What I remember most about the sugar cane field burnings was the noise made while the fields were burning. The sound was auspicious – and a little bit scary.
The burning is also done in part to drive out the snakes and the other animals from the field, according to what people told me.
By the way, have you seen how they work the actual cutting?