Still working on how to structure this blog; what to leave in, what to leave out. So today’s posting (actually written over a week after the events) is more or less a travelog.
I’ve been driving for a long time through areas that are full of cane fields. I suppose that I’ve driven 500 km or more watching these for a lot of the time. At first I wondered what’s up but on doing a little internet search: It turns out that back in the mid 1800’s they figure out that sugar cane grows well in this subtropical to tropical part of Queensland. I don’t know what percent of the world’s sugar comes from around here but there’s a lot of acreage dedicated to it.
I tried to stop a few times to see how it’s all done because the other thing I noticed in the area are all of these tracks and cane trains. When you get closer, the cane is planted pretty close together in these kind of clumps. In the first picture you can see some mature cane and some that’s still not full sized.
It is interesting to me that I saw fields that were recently planted, in various stages of growing, and fully mature and being cut. So I guess it isn’t too seasonal. Anyway, they cut the cane and load it into these pretty large trucks. I didn’t see many of the trucks on the highways. They drive them through the fields to trains and unload them into cane trains.
I never got close to the cutting machines in a place where I could pull off the road but this is what they look like from a distance. It’s a prehistoric dinosaur machine!
These machines are really amazing. They cut the cane off, maybe 100 mm from the ground. (I’m going to be working in Australian units. So all you Gringos are going to have to learn to do the conversions.) And somehow in the machine they chop things in a way that the leaves and non-cane parts of the plant are blown out the top and into the field while the cane parts are dropped into the bed of the cane trucks. There would be several trucks lining up and moving along with the cutter. It’s a relatively modern, industrialized process. Nothing like the individuals with their machetes cutting cane in Latin America years ago. When the cutting is done, the fields are pretty clean. You can see the leftover tops but there isn’t much left behind. I’ve heard lots about burning the cane fields. It’s a big deal in Florida. There were a couple of places in my drive where I could see some smoke that looked like they might be burning a field. And I actually only saw 4 or 5 fields where it looked like they had been burned. Maybe the process is different today. There were occasional signs along the roads selling cane mulch.
The trucks drive through the fields to wherever the train cars are parked and unload into them. See if I can get a video of the process in here
I saw a couple of different types of trucks. This one is pretty similar to the modern garbage trucks in the way he unloads a full load into a single train car. As I was watching this whole process a different kind of truck came along to unload. Check this out. He raised the bed and started kind of pouring the cane out. He could move along and sort of top off the cars as he went. There must be some kind of auger in that bed. Anyway, overall, it’s a pretty cool way of cutting.
I kept trying to get some photos or video of the trains moving through the fields but all I got was this train at a crossing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the engine.
These are really narrow track trains. The tracks run for thousands and thousands of km all over this part of Queensland.
That track is less than a meter across.
The trains deliver the cut cane to pretty significant processing plants.
Here’s a few photos of one that I could stop and take pictures of. I’m pretty sure that the majority of that “smoke” coming from the smokestack is water because it dispersed quickly and I didn’t see significant haze. I should probably read up on what the extraction process really is. These pictures were taken on a Sunday so the plant must run all the time. I didn’t see many people. Hardly saw anyone around the plant. But these could be the kind of facility that only takes a couple of people to run the whole damn thing. My guess is that these produce some kind of liquid, like molasses. I didn’t see any trains or trucks taking the product out of the plant but that could just be because it was a weekend. And, driving the roads for several days I never saw any trucks that I could imagine were hauling molasses or sugar so my guess is that they use the regular rail for that. There are a bunch of regular train tracks in this part of Queensland, on top of the huge number of cane train tracks. But, I did see several of these processing plants as I travelled.
Well, after seeing the factories that produce your sugar, I wonder if that’ll reduce desire?? It’s curious to me how humans have come to use so much sugar. This was all about cane sugar or sucrose to us chemists. In the US, where there isn’t much sugar cane grown, we use corn sugars as sweetener. That's clearly a topic for lots of argument. But, to me it's more about quantity rather than type of sugar. It just ain't natural, as they say.
If anyone has been to the Port of Baltimore, there’s a huge Domino sugar factory. They bring molasses in from the Caribbean in tanker ships and offload it and process it into white, crystalline sugar.
That's it for this adventure. Next I'm up in Cairns.
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