Grinding done!

St. John – The parish’s sugar cane farmers will be able to spend their Christmas holiday relaxing with family or out hunting with friends. The harvest season for the 2016 crop ended Monday when the last loads of cut cane were delivered to the LaSuCa mill here.
General Manager Mike Comb said Tuesday that the final grinding tally was 1,030,000 tons of cane. “It’s not what we wanted, but it was close,” he says.
On the bright side, this year’s crop averaged 244 pounds of sugar per ton, a record for LaSuCa. That works out to 251 million pounds of raw sugar produced by the mill’s farmer members.
The mill made it through the 12-week grinding season with few significant mechanical problems, according to Comb, partially as a result of near ideal weather for much of the harvest.
As crews went through the process of shutting down the sprawling mill on Tuesday Comb commented that one farmer had remarked that he would have liked to have enough cane to harvest for another week. “But he also said that he was glad that he’ll be off for Christmas,” Comb added.