A Fabulous Week Spent at the Cane Farm !

A Fabulous Week Spent at the Cane Farm

We had been invited to spend some time with friends on a cane farm. It was a wonderful week of relaxing, getting to know new friends, being shown around by a local, and finally getting to set our caravan up and spread out a little.

We were shown first hand the different workings of a cane farm and witnessed the hard work and long hours put in by the workers doing the haul out. 

Wherever there is cane farms there is a multitude of rail lines through every farm and town to service the cane haul out, a very efficient network. The harvester cuts the cane which is directed into haul out bins on the back of a truck, which then races the bins down to the rail line and adds them to the finished bins for pick up by the cane train loco. Each farm is allocated a number of bins for the day which are dropped off by the loco and picked up later. The driver then takes the next group of bins and races back to the harvester. There were, in this case, three drivers who rotated through these steps so that the harvester did not stop its work of cutting the cane. As they said, ' down time for the harvester means loss of money while the expensive equipment stands still waiting and longer days... Time is money.' 

The men begin work in the early hours of the morning and may not get home any time up to the early evening.

Below is a photo of a loco train hauling empty bins through the centre of town on the Bruce Highway. The bottom one is the common sight, and smell, of a sugar cane mill in the local towns. It is not uncommon for everything to be covered in a fine soot from the sugar cane burns. Where we stayed the cane was not burnt before harvesting.

By Lynne