A SWEET PROSPECT, this cooperative sugar mill revived an industry that once thrived in the Rio Grande Valley before falling on hard times earlier this century. Several years of drouth threatened it again, but this year's crop is expected to be the largest in the co-op's 30-year history.

Valley Sugar Co-op Expecting
Biggest Production Year Ever

SANTA ROSA, Texas — Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers Inc., a farmer-owned cooperative, processes about 1.5 million tons of cane annually. That translates into 100,000 tons of raw sugar and 45,000 tons of blackstrap molasses.

Members of the Texas Agricultural Lifetime Leadership program visited the sugar mill on their recent trip to the Rio Grande Valley. Humberto Vela, director of personnel and public relations, talked TALL members through the entire sugar cane industry history, growing, harvesting and processing story.

Production of sugar from cane is a global industry, Vela said, and sugar cane has been a part of Texas history since before the Civil War. By 1913, five major mills were operating throughout the Valley. A bad economy, however, forced all of them to close in 1921. The Valley changed to citrus, vegetables, cotton and grain. When those crops hit tough times, Valley farmers once again looked to sugar cane.

Thus, nearly 50 years later, a determined group of 100 growers came together to form a new cooperative. Each member grower pledged funding and cropland toward the goal of planting sugarcane, constructing a sugar mill, purchasing necessary equipment and hiring qualified personnel. They wanted to do it right, and decided to start with the most modern technology available. The construction of the mill began in 1970 and was completed three years later at a cost of $28 million. Harvesting began that December.

Today the cooperative has some 135 grower members, but that number changes from year to year. Members pay a one-time membership fee, what they call "grinding rights," which gives them the right to grind their cane at the mill. With this right comes the guarantee that the grower member will produce "X" number of tons annually. If a grower falls short of that commitment, he is penalized.

This year’s crop is the largest in history in terms of acreage.

"How is that possible when we didn’t have any water? Farmers are very optimistic," Vela told TALL members. "After about five years of drouth and no growth, farmers decided to get tonnage up. The co-op had to have more volume or decide to close down. We can’t stay breaking even forever."

The plant is located in the geographic center of the cane growing area, Vela noted. That cane growing area is spread out over 500 miles and concentrated in a three-county area, Hidalgo, Cameron and Willacy counties.

Planting and maintenance of the crop is managed by the grower, while the cooperative is responsible for scheduling, harvesting, processing and marketing the product. The cooperative has 650 to 700 employees during peak season, about 450 to 500 of them seasonal workers.

Sugar cane is not grown from seed but rather from cane. Each piece of seed cane, 18 to 24 inches in length, has three or four vegetative buds which germinate into new plants. Planting begins in August and lasts a few months. Nearly three-fourths of the sugar cane, Vela said, is planted by hand, the other quarter by machine. Sugar cane requires between 40 and 50 inches of water annually, thus irrigation is a vital part of raising cane.

Harvest begins a year later in October and continues until all the cane is out of the field. In years past that’s been in February, but this year because of the additional acreage, Vela said harvest will likely continue until April or early May.

The average life of cane is five years, but some fields last as long as 15 years. Harvests generally average 30 to 36 tons of raw cane per acre, which yields about 10 percent or 3.6 tons of raw sugar per acre.

Few pests impact a sugar cane crop. A freeze, however, will decimate a crop, the speaker said.

"If we have 28 degree temperature, say, for more than six hours, we can have problems," he told the group. "When we have freezing temperatures, the liquid in the cane expands and that causes splits in the cane. Then when the temperature rises, bacteria gets in those splits and begins destroying the crop.

"If it's very, very cold for a long time, like say, below 20 degrees for a few weeks, then the root system will die out and we will have to replant."

To determine when the cane is ready to harvest, a juice sample is taken from the field. A refractometer is used to analyze the amount of dissolved solids in the juice. Preharvest burning is the most efficient method of harvesting cane. Burning, Vela explained, removes the dead, dry leaves surrounding the stalk which have no economic value. There is no damage to the valuable stalk. The cooperative follows state laws for burning as well as other laws set forth by the cooperative itself.

A computer program decides the order in which fields are harvested. It takes into account the different varieties, whether early, mid-maturing or late maturing.

The mechanical harvester and in-field transport tractor work in tandem. One set of rotating blades on the harvester removes the top of the cane and a second blade cuts the stock at ground level and draws it into the harvester. The cane is cut into smaller pieces once inside the harvester. It then goes into the in-field transport tractors with their specially designed boxes which can hold 10 tons. The tractor delivers that load to the transfer pad. Here a 20-ton forklift transfers the cane boxes between the tractor and container trailers, Vela explained.

To maintain efficiency inside the mill, a steady supply of harvested cane must be on hand. Skilled operators work in shifts to keep the cane coming so the plant can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, six to eight months out of the year.

"The 'port-a-box' system was developed at this mill and perfected here," Vela said. "It’s the first of its kind and now it's used all over the world.

"When we’re running at capacity it takes a truck about three minutes from the time it gets to the mill until it unloads," he continued. "It takes about three hours to run 150 boxes of cane through the mill. Cane begins to deteriorate if it's not ground within 72 hours of harvest, particularly when the daytime temperatures are above normal."

On arrival, each container is weighed. The driver delivers a ticket to the scale operator which identifies the cane by field, owner and variety.

Each box of cane is then hydraulically pushed off the truck and dumped onto a moving conveyor. As the cane enters the factory, it is washed to remove excess dirt. As it enters the mill, it travels through seven mills which squeeze and grind the cane, removing more juice each time. The crushed cane, called bagasse, is then conveyed directly to the boilers and used as fuel to generate steam and electricity.

"The cooperative is self-sustaining and nothing goes to waste," Vega said. "The bagasse is used to generate steam and electricity. Steam runs the turbines which operate the mills. Some is recaptured in the form of water and reused.

"We could sell the byproducts like pulp, but it’s worth more to us in Btu’s," he added.

The extracted raw juice is pumped to a clarification station where it is heated and impurities removed. It is then analyzed for sugar content and quality to partially determine the price paid to the grower, Vela explained.

Solids are filtered out a step further. The resulting material, called filtercake, is returned to the field to use as fertilizer, while the liquid, or filtrate, is returned to the factory for reprocessing.

Much of the water is removed through evaporation, which condenses the raw juice to syrup. During crystallization, the syrup is heated at a reduced atmospheric pressure and an exact amount of powered sugar is added to assist in the growth of uniform sugar crystals. The resulting sugar crystals and molasses are separated by centrifugal force in a process similar to the spin cycle in a washing machine.

The molasses is stored on-site in three tanks capable of holding a total of five million gallons. It is sold as cattle feed and shipped either by truck or rail to local and area cattle operations. The raw sugar, 98 percent pure, travels to the warehouse for storage.

The warehouse is 150 feet wide and 600 feet long, equivalent to two football fields, and can hold up to 70,000 tons of raw sugar or about two-thirds of the co-op's annual crop. While in storage, the raw sugar has to be moved around or it will harden and solidify into a rock. When there’s enough sugar, it is transported by truck to the port of Harlingen. There it is loaded onto barges which carry the raw sugar to a refinery just outside New Orleans, where it is processed once more and made into the consumer-ready product of refined sugar.

The cooperative used to sell all its raw sugar to Imperial, based in Sugar Land. Today it all goes to Domino. Raw sugar, Vela said, generally sells for $365 to $400 a ton. Average cost for harvesting is about $6 a ton, which includes about $2.50 a ton for transportation and the remaining being processing costs. The mill keeps 40 percent of the profits after costs and the remaining 60 percent goes to the growers.

The U.S. is a net importer of sugar, and the Rio Grande Valley, Vela said, is a negligible player in terms of U.S. production. In fact, most of the sugar used in the U.S. comes from sugar beets. Big producers of sugar in the U.S. are the northern states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. Sugar cane is produced in Florida, Texas and a small amount in Hawaii.

"We produce about one-tenth of one percent of the sugar that is used in the U.S. annually. So we could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t have any impact," Vela told TALL members. "Conversely, anything that happens in the rest of the country affects the cooperative tremendously. One penny a pound difference in the price hurts us."

Vela concluded by affirming his belief in the cooperative system.

"I think cooperatives will be what allows agriculture to survive into the future. If you try to stand alone, you’re going to die."