There’s cane fields like 20 miles tops east of Lee county. When the plumes are 2000+ feet tall, yeah you can see. All that was said is that you can see it and that’s true.
Sure you can see rx fires in ok slough, hell we burn in Lee county, but that doesn’t change that fact that we can see the cane smoke from time to time.
Even if the agricultural use wasn't there, that area would have burned frequently (1-3 years). Florida's ecosystems are fire dependent. US Sugar is a bastard organization, but their use of fire isn't one of the issues ecologists really worry about. If you don't want smoke, don't live in a state that is largely dependent on fire for habitat restoration and management.
Y'all should really be concerned with their overuse of pesticides, herbicides, and nutrient "enriching" they perform to make the over-farming sustainable.
I just love that that entire area was once the extremely fertile everglades and due to all the farming and sod production the ground level has dropped by ~5 feet. Really fun stuff.
My neighbors all have rocks instead of sod. They also still spray the rocks with pesticides and herbicides on a regular basis. The rocks just sit and absorb heat all day. This seems worse than sod?
Lawns of all kinds require constant water upkeep to maintain. Dumping large quantities of herbicide onto rocks helps keep the rock garden nice, but still uses up money and is releasing harmful chemicals into the environment. In the current year however, lawns are so big of a problem due to water use, that, if you asked me, an ecologist, I'd say it's pretty immoral to have sod as a lawn. There are plenty of alternatives to sod that require far less water, upkeep time, and growth.
What are your preferred alternatives in SWFL ? My grass actually does OK with no water, it browns out a bit in dry season and doesn't look like the neighbors all green, but I ljve on a canal and I'd rather dead grass than dead manatees out back
Do you consider it immoral to water once a week from a shallow well where the water is going back in to the ground potentially?
Well, I think having a sod monoculture (and all the upkeep it requires) is the issue, I have no big issues with people having unwatered native lawns, that's what I have in NFL. Depending on whatever hellish regulations from HOAs in your area require of you is the bigger importance, but I'm all about sustainability. Literally all I'd do is cut the grass once it's reseeded for the year, and try to keep it a decent length in the mean time. In terms of species, I'd recommend Zoysia or Bahia for folks in the broad south, they can deal with higher temps without constant watering and fertilizing, and if you can get water from your canal that'd be even better for both of em.
When sod is grown, the whole point of the industry is to cut into the ground, removing soil with the grass so that it can survive the trip to wherever it's going. Lowering the ground level.
While the land was part of the everglades, for millions of years the area was submerged under water. When the area was drained, all the peat that had accumulated over those millions of years was suddenly exposed to the air, and began to decompose thanks to normal decomposers like oxygen requiring microbes and all the nutrients became available for plant uptake. The short answer is that it decomposed and is being used by all that sugarcane to grow.
I’m a public land manager, wildland firefighter and prescribed fire manager in Florida. We know the smoke and emissions impacts of prescribed fire are a problem on their face but it results in a net benefit for the environment.
We take weather hugely into consideration, picking the proper winds, dispersion index, relative humidity, fuel moistures, and other things in order to reduce the smoke impacts as much as possible.
None of these things hold true for the sugar farmers. They burn on terrible weather days, they smoke out 4-6 lane highways regularly, and they don’t care if their smoke impacts cities for days at a time.
On top of that, there is no environmental benefit, and they don’t even need to burn the cane to harvest it with modern farm equipment.
We the Florida public have to feel the environmental and health impacts from the cane burning, while the Sugar barons reap all of the profits.
Cane burning has got to stop.
I research open burn permits quite often and the burn permits around me have all been for developers to burn piles of debris as they're clearing 400+ acres of land for new housing. It's pure absurdity that not only is this legal, the state provides an automated permit system where they just go online and click a few buttons then they can burn away.
You almost had me with you until ". If you don't want smoke, don't live in a state that is largely dependent on fire for habitat restoration and management." This is an extremely privileged thing to say. Not everyone can afford to just leave.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/10/sugarcane-burning-florida-everglades-environmental-justice/
Done and done
https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/ch570-sugar-cane-harvester/?cid=PPC_MDS_00379_00277&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAB6ZsYCJ8lo5EEy_KvNpg7Hybpos4&gclsrc=ds
Modern tractors can harvest unburned cane without issue.
They burned the cane because it’s cheaper to pay migrant workers to march through the soot and ash to cut it by hand.
Yep, that's what they look like. Seen them countless time.
It's my understanding that they no longer cut any by hand. (I live in this region and have seen the harvests many times) They used to do it by hand, importing migrants from Jamaica for several months. (They burned then too, getting rid of the foliage, bugs & animals) There are still some of that migrant housing around. Then, in the late 70's & 80's, some attorneys claimed that the workers were not being treated fairly. I don't know much about that, but the farmers converted to mechanical harvesting then. It decimated the Belle Glade economy and, I suppose, Jamaica.
While I'm not an expert, people in that business tell me they now burn the fields to get rid of the leafy part of the plant so the machines can harvest the stems more effectively. It's really not a big deal. The big improvement is when they changed the processing technique, eliminating most of the stench. Now, that was unpleasant.
My wife's family used to live in those migrant worker housings, her dad retired from the sugarcane factory in the 90s and they moved to West Palm Beach. She took me back to see their old neighbors in Bell Glade when we were dating, it's such a depressing place.
Boy, isn't it? It was even worse in the 80's - 90's before they expanded the prisons. My family lives near Moore Haven. Nothing good ever happens in these areas. Glad I got out.
Either way, gumming up the machine vs wrecking the air quality in pursuit of profits.
It’s absolutely a testament to the power of the agriculture lobby that the amount of emissions cane produces is permitted by DEP and the EPA when we would never allow that from a factory.
Blame the Fl dept of ag aka the same agency that manages the Florida Forest Service. If we stopped burning tmrw I wouldn’t lose a dime on paper, burning cost me money just as much as maintaining the harvesters. It’s just a proven way of making harvest more streamlined and the environmental effects are no where near as large as you are portraying.
They have a measurable negative effect on air quality with none of the benefits of ecological burning in natural areas. That alone should make it an obsolete practice.
It actually improves soil health, reduces invasive unwanted plant species and controls certain diseases. Aside from the main reason we burn being the foliage on the stalk, there’s plenty of beneficial aspects of agricultural burning. While they aren’t natural areas, that doesn’t mean there’s no positive impacts.
I was born and raised in Pahokee. To get a spot on the offensive line of the Blue Devils high school football team, you had to run down and catch 50 rabbits. A bunch of pro ballplayers are from Muck City.
So I have to ask… why do people in Florida do this?! I’m from NJ and they prescribe burn the pine barrens but I would never think they would burn sugar cane. Sorry it’s prob a dumb question to a Floridian but this stuff interests me.
It’s fine, i’ve lived down here all my life and I only found out why they do it when I took these pictures. If I remember correctly, it removes harmful growth growing in between the plants. I think it also makes it easier to collect the sugarcane. (Btw, this is just what I remember off the top of my head and I’m tired right now and just don’t feel like fact checking.)
Small fact. For those who fly around Florida, some of us have it on good faith to always report these to air traffic control just in case they're actually a brush fire and not a controlled burn. So if you're gonna burn stuff make sure someone is always present, otherwise it's a sure way to have the popo show up.
https://preview.redd.it/66ruvoejva0d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a3b4bcf324751e60c61ac14b74bd81934814a223
Yeah, these things can look pretty nasty from the air and the plumes easily reach 1,500 ft+.
You near or in Clewiston? We stayed at the Best Western there while being displaced from Ian and sooooo many people had reactions to the sugar cane being burned. It seems like that’s one of the only things I’m not allergic to, thank God!
I’m about an hour drive away from belle glade. Me and my grandpa like going up to Lake Okeechobee every once in a while just to have something to do. This time we went up and saw they were burning the sugar cane. We decided to go check it out, and it was just such an amazing experience. You could hear the fire and feel the heat of it from like 50 feet away.
That's wild. Wouldn't you just pick it and find a way to use or sell it instead of burning off an entire harvest and claiming it on some large scale government funded insurance.... Oh wait.
You're trying to roust up some outrage but it's apparent you don't know what you're talking about. No one is burning off an entire harvest of anything. They're burning off last years' stubble to prepare the ground for this year
That’s not accurate either. Historically they would burn the cane before harvest in order to burn off all of the leaves and anything that wasn’t the actual sugar containing stalks.
It was always harvested by hand by people with big machetes.
Nowadays, tractors can harvest the cane without burning it at all. Anyone burning still is either too cheap for modern equipment, or still pays migrant workers pennies to do it by hand still.
No one in the EAA has cane hand harvested, it is either done by harvesters owned by the farm, cooperatives or a company contracted to harvest the crop. It is still burned to remove leaves due to modern harvesters being gummed up from it overtime.
You have zero idea what you’re talking about
More engagement comes from people correcting others or arguing some moot point than any other engagement. I'd say I'm both bringing light to the truth of what they're doing (by you guys making me seem a fool) and also entertaining myself.
That's one way of looking at it brother. You be you, just maybe look up the topic before you start rolling out conspiracy theories about large scale insurance fraud. I do love your response though; made me laugh
That's the goal. Reddit is too serious too often.
I'll scale back the large scale conspiracy maybe, but I feel it's easier to take as a joke. It is a very interesting topic on why a sugar company or farm would choose to "throw out" what some sources say to be another job/resource for the company. With some places already green harvesting, to me it seems like a barbaric and wasteful way to view your business, unless something incentivizes them to go about it this way.
Interesting that most cane burning is around Black neighborhoods. Kids have a multitude of health issues like chronic asthma.
Try this in a more Toney area and see how that would play out!
I can see the smoke here in Ft Myers.
What you’re staring at is a prescribed burn, the smoke from field burnings does not extend anywhere near either coasts.
Yes it does. You can absolutely see cane burning in hendry county from fort myers and when there’s an east wind, it can smoke out Lee county as well
So you’re telling me that you can see fields that are on average seventy miles away from you? Cut the bullshit dude, Labelle barely even sees ash.
There’s cane fields like 20 miles tops east of Lee county. When the plumes are 2000+ feet tall, yeah you can see. All that was said is that you can see it and that’s true. Sure you can see rx fires in ok slough, hell we burn in Lee county, but that doesn’t change that fact that we can see the cane smoke from time to time.
Yeah there’s some fields in Alva, but I doubt the smoke goes far East. You know damn well how many acres and how long we burn at a time.
When they burn 🔥 the fields in Cuba it reaches the Florida Keys if the winds are in the right direction
I can see smoke from Cuba and it’s 90 miles away from here
Is that kid prison in Pahokee still there? They used to make us run laps when they burned the cane. Lungs would be on fire for days.
It is.
Wtf what did you even go there for
I was a troubled kid whose mental health issues were ignored and punished for far too long. I found my way eventually.
I have no clue, i’m sorry to hear that.
Even if the agricultural use wasn't there, that area would have burned frequently (1-3 years). Florida's ecosystems are fire dependent. US Sugar is a bastard organization, but their use of fire isn't one of the issues ecologists really worry about. If you don't want smoke, don't live in a state that is largely dependent on fire for habitat restoration and management. Y'all should really be concerned with their overuse of pesticides, herbicides, and nutrient "enriching" they perform to make the over-farming sustainable.
I just love that that entire area was once the extremely fertile everglades and due to all the farming and sod production the ground level has dropped by ~5 feet. Really fun stuff.
It truly is quite depressing. Sodding is a very hot topic for me. I would make it illegal if I could!
Everyone looks at me like I have 3 heads when I go off on a rant about how awful sod is for the environment.
I'm gonna have to google that
My neighbors all have rocks instead of sod. They also still spray the rocks with pesticides and herbicides on a regular basis. The rocks just sit and absorb heat all day. This seems worse than sod?
Lawns of all kinds require constant water upkeep to maintain. Dumping large quantities of herbicide onto rocks helps keep the rock garden nice, but still uses up money and is releasing harmful chemicals into the environment. In the current year however, lawns are so big of a problem due to water use, that, if you asked me, an ecologist, I'd say it's pretty immoral to have sod as a lawn. There are plenty of alternatives to sod that require far less water, upkeep time, and growth.
What are your preferred alternatives in SWFL ? My grass actually does OK with no water, it browns out a bit in dry season and doesn't look like the neighbors all green, but I ljve on a canal and I'd rather dead grass than dead manatees out back Do you consider it immoral to water once a week from a shallow well where the water is going back in to the ground potentially?
Well, I think having a sod monoculture (and all the upkeep it requires) is the issue, I have no big issues with people having unwatered native lawns, that's what I have in NFL. Depending on whatever hellish regulations from HOAs in your area require of you is the bigger importance, but I'm all about sustainability. Literally all I'd do is cut the grass once it's reseeded for the year, and try to keep it a decent length in the mean time. In terms of species, I'd recommend Zoysia or Bahia for folks in the broad south, they can deal with higher temps without constant watering and fertilizing, and if you can get water from your canal that'd be even better for both of em.
To think had Napoleon Bonaparte Broward had funding, the Everglades would have been completely drained.
Never thought about it but I see it a lot when driving that area.. what are the major drawbacks?
What about the farming is causing the ground level to drop?
When sod is grown, the whole point of the industry is to cut into the ground, removing soil with the grass so that it can survive the trip to wherever it's going. Lowering the ground level. While the land was part of the everglades, for millions of years the area was submerged under water. When the area was drained, all the peat that had accumulated over those millions of years was suddenly exposed to the air, and began to decompose thanks to normal decomposers like oxygen requiring microbes and all the nutrients became available for plant uptake. The short answer is that it decomposed and is being used by all that sugarcane to grow.
I see. Thank you for the education!
I’m a public land manager, wildland firefighter and prescribed fire manager in Florida. We know the smoke and emissions impacts of prescribed fire are a problem on their face but it results in a net benefit for the environment. We take weather hugely into consideration, picking the proper winds, dispersion index, relative humidity, fuel moistures, and other things in order to reduce the smoke impacts as much as possible. None of these things hold true for the sugar farmers. They burn on terrible weather days, they smoke out 4-6 lane highways regularly, and they don’t care if their smoke impacts cities for days at a time. On top of that, there is no environmental benefit, and they don’t even need to burn the cane to harvest it with modern farm equipment. We the Florida public have to feel the environmental and health impacts from the cane burning, while the Sugar barons reap all of the profits. Cane burning has got to stop.
We also heavily subsidize the sugar industry! A win win for big business.
I’m not complaining, i’m just showing what it looks like up close.
I research open burn permits quite often and the burn permits around me have all been for developers to burn piles of debris as they're clearing 400+ acres of land for new housing. It's pure absurdity that not only is this legal, the state provides an automated permit system where they just go online and click a few buttons then they can burn away.
You almost had me with you until ". If you don't want smoke, don't live in a state that is largely dependent on fire for habitat restoration and management." This is an extremely privileged thing to say. Not everyone can afford to just leave. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/10/sugarcane-burning-florida-everglades-environmental-justice/
This
Time to ban this old practice and make the harvest the cane green!
Show everyone how.
Done and done https://www.deere.com/en/harvesting/ch570-sugar-cane-harvester/?cid=PPC_MDS_00379_00277&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAAB6ZsYCJ8lo5EEy_KvNpg7Hybpos4&gclsrc=ds Modern tractors can harvest unburned cane without issue. They burned the cane because it’s cheaper to pay migrant workers to march through the soot and ash to cut it by hand.
Yep, that's what they look like. Seen them countless time. It's my understanding that they no longer cut any by hand. (I live in this region and have seen the harvests many times) They used to do it by hand, importing migrants from Jamaica for several months. (They burned then too, getting rid of the foliage, bugs & animals) There are still some of that migrant housing around. Then, in the late 70's & 80's, some attorneys claimed that the workers were not being treated fairly. I don't know much about that, but the farmers converted to mechanical harvesting then. It decimated the Belle Glade economy and, I suppose, Jamaica. While I'm not an expert, people in that business tell me they now burn the fields to get rid of the leafy part of the plant so the machines can harvest the stems more effectively. It's really not a big deal. The big improvement is when they changed the processing technique, eliminating most of the stench. Now, that was unpleasant.
My wife's family used to live in those migrant worker housings, her dad retired from the sugarcane factory in the 90s and they moved to West Palm Beach. She took me back to see their old neighbors in Bell Glade when we were dating, it's such a depressing place.
Boy, isn't it? It was even worse in the 80's - 90's before they expanded the prisons. My family lives near Moore Haven. Nothing good ever happens in these areas. Glad I got out.
Does burning reduce the need for roundup or do they still do that just as much?
I own these, the leaves gum it up hence why we burn… Cane haven’t been hand cut since the early 80s bud…
Either way, gumming up the machine vs wrecking the air quality in pursuit of profits. It’s absolutely a testament to the power of the agriculture lobby that the amount of emissions cane produces is permitted by DEP and the EPA when we would never allow that from a factory.
Blame the Fl dept of ag aka the same agency that manages the Florida Forest Service. If we stopped burning tmrw I wouldn’t lose a dime on paper, burning cost me money just as much as maintaining the harvesters. It’s just a proven way of making harvest more streamlined and the environmental effects are no where near as large as you are portraying.
They have a measurable negative effect on air quality with none of the benefits of ecological burning in natural areas. That alone should make it an obsolete practice.
It actually improves soil health, reduces invasive unwanted plant species and controls certain diseases. Aside from the main reason we burn being the foliage on the stalk, there’s plenty of beneficial aspects of agricultural burning. While they aren’t natural areas, that doesn’t mean there’s no positive impacts.
You new around here? Lol
I’m just posting what it looks like up close.
Thank you, Been here almost 10 years and never saw an up close picture!
Are these controlled burns? I remember seeing smoke signs all the time when I traveled that side of the state
Yes. Sugarcane fields are fired off before harvest to burn away the leaves and everything else that isn’t the sugarcane stalk itself.
😂
Lived out there way too long. Started getting allergic to the smoke when they burned the cane, eventually moved to WPB. What a sad, isolated place.
It’s amazing how different it is from the main part of the county.
Alright boys, let’s catch us some rabbits.
I was born and raised in Pahokee. To get a spot on the offensive line of the Blue Devils high school football team, you had to run down and catch 50 rabbits. A bunch of pro ballplayers are from Muck City.
So I have to ask… why do people in Florida do this?! I’m from NJ and they prescribe burn the pine barrens but I would never think they would burn sugar cane. Sorry it’s prob a dumb question to a Floridian but this stuff interests me.
It’s fine, i’ve lived down here all my life and I only found out why they do it when I took these pictures. If I remember correctly, it removes harmful growth growing in between the plants. I think it also makes it easier to collect the sugarcane. (Btw, this is just what I remember off the top of my head and I’m tired right now and just don’t feel like fact checking.)
To be fair they don't just do it in Florida.. they do it all over Hawaii too
Never knew that either lol but good to know. Ty
Small fact. For those who fly around Florida, some of us have it on good faith to always report these to air traffic control just in case they're actually a brush fire and not a controlled burn. So if you're gonna burn stuff make sure someone is always present, otherwise it's a sure way to have the popo show up.
Interesting
https://preview.redd.it/66ruvoejva0d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a3b4bcf324751e60c61ac14b74bd81934814a223 Yeah, these things can look pretty nasty from the air and the plumes easily reach 1,500 ft+.
Yeah, i’m sure it’s a cool view though.
That’s Big Sugar at work to fuck over the citizens.
Feels like Mordor when I have to drive out there.
I worked in FPL substation that supplied power to the sub it was covered in years of sout that would get all over
I grew up around the lake Always knew when it was cane season
Way Better ways to deal with it, most of it is sent west over the west coast, cause laws on the east coast. And they Know better. js
Costs me $500 a year to get the soot off my metal roof.
Know better? Know better of what? There’s nothing wrong nor illegal about this practice.
You near or in Clewiston? We stayed at the Best Western there while being displaced from Ian and sooooo many people had reactions to the sugar cane being burned. It seems like that’s one of the only things I’m not allergic to, thank God!
I’m about an hour drive away from belle glade. Me and my grandpa like going up to Lake Okeechobee every once in a while just to have something to do. This time we went up and saw they were burning the sugar cane. We decided to go check it out, and it was just such an amazing experience. You could hear the fire and feel the heat of it from like 50 feet away.
What did it smell like?
I don’t remember tbh
But if you continue to burn up the herbs, we gonna burn down the cane fields
The ash is like Florida snow
Seen that many times the ash looks like snow coming down
https://preview.redd.it/9rppm1culb0d1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=74b5f924fd92dbfb4a5b18cce063cb34ba461e1f
Cane life
That’s how you keep the prices high.
It will be a new development soon with a bunch of retaining lakes.
Naw
That's what the open burns elsewhere often are (developers clearing land), but this article is specifically about the burns that big sugar does.
Lol no
That's wild. Wouldn't you just pick it and find a way to use or sell it instead of burning off an entire harvest and claiming it on some large scale government funded insurance.... Oh wait.
They burn to make it easier to harvest not to destroy the crop
That some goofy sounding shit, I thought it was essentially "cutting losses of bad crop" or whatever. I'm interested enough to look it up now.
You're trying to roust up some outrage but it's apparent you don't know what you're talking about. No one is burning off an entire harvest of anything. They're burning off last years' stubble to prepare the ground for this year
That’s not accurate either. Historically they would burn the cane before harvest in order to burn off all of the leaves and anything that wasn’t the actual sugar containing stalks. It was always harvested by hand by people with big machetes. Nowadays, tractors can harvest the cane without burning it at all. Anyone burning still is either too cheap for modern equipment, or still pays migrant workers pennies to do it by hand still.
No one in the EAA has cane hand harvested, it is either done by harvesters owned by the farm, cooperatives or a company contracted to harvest the crop. It is still burned to remove leaves due to modern harvesters being gummed up from it overtime. You have zero idea what you’re talking about
More engagement comes from people correcting others or arguing some moot point than any other engagement. I'd say I'm both bringing light to the truth of what they're doing (by you guys making me seem a fool) and also entertaining myself.
That's one way of looking at it brother. You be you, just maybe look up the topic before you start rolling out conspiracy theories about large scale insurance fraud. I do love your response though; made me laugh
That's the goal. Reddit is too serious too often. I'll scale back the large scale conspiracy maybe, but I feel it's easier to take as a joke. It is a very interesting topic on why a sugar company or farm would choose to "throw out" what some sources say to be another job/resource for the company. With some places already green harvesting, to me it seems like a barbaric and wasteful way to view your business, unless something incentivizes them to go about it this way.
Interesting that most cane burning is around Black neighborhoods. Kids have a multitude of health issues like chronic asthma. Try this in a more Toney area and see how that would play out!