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Work continues in this cane field west of Franklin as smoke from a burned off field rises in the background.

The Daily Review/Bill Decker

Cane crop holds up in a stormy year

While hurricanes and COVID-19 have dealt blows to some industries in 2020, the area’s sugarcane crop has been lucky to see minimal affects from these two impacts.
“We have more things to be thankful for than not to be thankful for,” LSU Ag Center County Agent Blair Hebert said of this Thanksgiving.
He said that the crop as of now is comparable to a year ago.
He said that COVID-19 had a minimal effect on the crop.
“If you go all the way back to the spring, we were able to do what we needed to do in the spring,” he said. “We were able to do tillage. We passed our equipment on it. We got fertilizer on it. We got chemical down on it in the spring and the sum-mer. So I'm not going to say that we didn't have some days that were lost here or there, but for the most part, COVID had very little effect on that crop getting to maturity."
He said that they had some trouble getting seasonal labor into the United States, but he wasn’t sure if that was COVID-19-related.
“There's a lot of red tape to get seasonal foreign labor back into the country” if done legally, something Hebert said the mills and the farmers do the right way.
Mike Accardo, owner of Idlewild Farms in Patterson, said they have had some workers who have been coming annually for about 10 years who they are working to get back into the country this year.
He said it’s something that a lot of farmers have been having to deal with.
As for hurricanes, he said they were concerned about what would happen to the crop with an active hurricane season, including Laura and Delta striking southwest Louisiana.
“But so far, the crop has done what we thought it would do in terms of tonnage,” Hebert said, also noting that the amount of sugar extracted from the cane has been “very respectable” considering the conditions they have endured.
Accardo said the hurricanes simply laid the cane down, unlike a year ago when Barry “shredded the tops” of the cane when it passed through the area.
“The winds weren’t high enough this year to shred the tops,” Accardo said. “It laid it over, but it didn’t shred the tops, so the hurricanes didn’t affect us that much this year.”
The hurricanes impacted the area, putting the harvest, which typically runs from Oct. 1 until around Jan. 10, about five days behind. However, Hebert said that is not a significant loss of time. It did, though, add to the labor costs for farmers.
Hebert said moving forward, the farmers need good weather, and after hurricane season ends, they need to avoid freezes.
“We’ve been lucky. We’ve had some good harvest conditions,” he said.

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