When Steve Messam arrived in Michigan in the early 2000s from Pahokee, Florida, for his first semester at Central Michigan University, he realized he was breathing differently. Going back home after the end of his first semester revealed to him what the problem was: The companies that surrounded his Florida community operated sugar cane fields that conducted “pre-harvest” burns to clear away cane leaves and ready the plants for the sugar mill. The ash from the cane burning, colloquially referred to as “black snow,” polluted the air and filled residents’ lungs with toxic particulate matter.
As part of pre-harvest burns, field operators systematically set fire to the crop to burn away leaves and ready the crop quickly and crudely. But mechanical harvesting, an alternative to burning that uses machines to tear leaves away from the sugar cane stalk, is readily available and offers other economic opportunities—all while ensuring that community members don’t have to contend with black snow.
Most other global sugar cane operations use mechanical “green harvesting” methods out of concern for nearby residents and for the environment, but farms in the Glades communities remain an exception. It’s an exception that portends certain realities of everyday life during cane burning season spanning October to March: missed school, having to stay indoors, and using nebulizers daily to aid with breathing. Doctors tell some residents that they should leave to improve their health. But moving can be expensive, and one-third of Glades residents’ incomes fall below the poverty line.
About 12,000 Glades residents are also employed by the sugar industry during the harvest season, and the last thing they want is for the industry to suffer. “We don’t want to see the industry shut down. We don’t see people losing their jobs. We just want them to be better neighbors,” Messam said.
As the years went by and conditions stayed the same, Messam formed a group in 2015 with other residents of the towns south of Lake Okeechobee, where sugar companies grow their crops. The goal of the group was simple: to figure out what could be done.
“We’re not just complaining about the issue; we’re also advocating the solution of green harvesting—that can be a win-win,” Messam said.
In the two decades since Messam connected the dots between black snow and his own breathing, sugar companies have continued to legally and wantonly pollute. In some ways, the conditions under which the majority-Black residents of the Glades communities in South Florida live have gotten worse despite an unprecedented level of media and public attention. For years, agencies at the local, state, and federal levels have failed to hold sugar cane companies accountable for pollution that bears a strong link to the region’s high rates of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Based on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, the Glades communities rank in the 80-100th percentile for cancer risk and respiratory illness.
In lieu of legislation that would ensure protections for public health, Messam and other community organizers are fighting for their own solutions and pushing companies to pivot.
With help from the federal government, sugar cane flourished
Agriculture was the foundation of the country’s economic system, and crops were its first currency; plantation crops of cotton, tobacco, and sugar harvested by enslaved Africans and Black Americans set the stage for land use, city development, and interstate commerce. The story in Florida offers one piece of the larger puzzle, illustrating how disinvested majority-Black communities of more than 40,000 residents came to bear the near-totality of industry pollution no other Florida neighborhoods are forced to contend with.
British colonizers first brought sugar to what would become Florida in the late 1760s, but the crop wouldn’t take off until after the 1900s. During the Civil War, sugar production shifted to the Hawaiian Islands. With a legal basis in the 1850 federal Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act, the federal government transferred 17 million acres of swamp and wetlands to private ownership. At the turn of the century, draining the Everglades was made a state priority, and by 1925, surveyors, botanists, and officials in the Department of Agriculture began to scope out the South Florida region for industrial farming.
Its soil was coveted: high in nitrogen and phosphoric acid, farmers wouldn’t have to spend as much on fertilizer. U.S. Sugar settled in the region in the 1930s. By the end of World War II, the sugar industry was exceedingly profitable, largely due to intervention from the federal government, which, through the Farm Bill, provided price floors and supply management, among other benefits. Other companies, like Florida Crystals, arrived in southern Florida in the 1960s after those federal changes to the farming industry. Mechanization also helped, as sugar cane went from being harvested by hand to machine, allowing outputs and profits to increase.
Now, 410,00 acres of Florida land are devoted to sugar cane, producing half of the U.S.’ cane sugar supply and earning the industry a record $739 million in 2020. But it wasn’t always the case that surrounding communities had to suffer so the country could get its sugar.
When sugar cane operations shifted from mechanical harvesting to burning, white communities to the east near Palm Beach objected to the black snow that blanketed their homes, cars, and pools. In a community of 35,000 people, an estimated 40-50 complaints were sent to state representatives, which were enough to prompt the U.S. Forest Service and Florida Department of Agriculture to alter burn regulations. Now, when the wind blows east, burn permits are not approved. When the wind blows west, burn permits are approved.
Black communities in the Glades have issued complaints for years but have not seen a comparable change in permitting approvals. In the past decade, interventions from the media have bolstered grassroots organizing by drawing out more details about the dangers of burning sugar cane and the inadequacies of health officials and others to properly document and regulate what are effectively high concentrations of air pollution. Even increased public discussion of this outright double standard drawn along lines of race and income hasn’t convinced government agencies of their culpability or dissuaded companies from burning sugar cane. In fact, in the 2021 legislative session, elected officials in Florida approved an amendment to a bill that blocks “nuisance lawsuits” against farmers over air pollution, essentially protecting the sugar industry from civil liability.
That same year, ProPublica partnered with The Palm Beach Post to chronicle the risk that sugar cane burning poses to residents of the Glades communities, finding that burn permits were more frequently approved when the wind was slated to blow westward. There are an estimated 10,300 sugar cane fires in Florida during the burning season, 90% of which take place in the Glades region. That’s the equivalent of particulate matter emissions from all of the vehicles in the state from one year concentrated in a single region over the course of six months.
The reporting uncovered that the state was relying on a single air monitor to track air pollution and that the monitor was only averaging out pollution levels over a 24-hour period. But sugar cane burns are usually conducted for 15-40 minutes at a time, creating spikes of short-term pollution not captured by the averaged data, which showed that air pollution levels adhered to federal Clean Air Act standards even as residents became ill. Other reporting found that the single monitor had been malfunctioning since 2013, and though the Florida Department of Environmental Protection informed the EPA, it’s unclear if any actions were taken to remedy faulty monitoring. One department spokesperson told The Palm Beach Post that the air monitors weren’t intended to adhere to Clean Air Act standards but to indicate local air quality.
Green harvesting, the “win-win” solution
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits race-based discrimination within programs that receive federal funding. So, in lieu of state or federal action, the Sierra Club filed a Civil Rights Act complaint with the EPA against the Florida Forest Service on behalf of residents in the Glades communities to investigate the agency’s burn approvals.
But legal battles can stretch on for years, and Florida’s sugar industry is powerful. Even if a judge found the Forest Service in violation of a federal law, it’s unclear what the outcome might be. However, there’s a potentially easy fix the region’s grassroots groups have long advocated for: Stop the Burn-Go Green.
The process of harvesting sugar cane without burning is called green harvesting, and it is already standard practice in other sugar cane-producing regions, including Brazil, Australia, and Cuba. The benefits are numerous, said Andrew Wood, an agricultural engineer based in Australia who’s studied the impacts of green harvesting for decades.
Organic leaf material (often called “trash” by the industry) that’s peeled away from the cane and left on the field can be incorporated back into the soil. Doing so increases the organic matter in the soil, which in turn benefits soil structure, water infiltration, microbiome activity, and ability of the soil to absorb fertilizer and nutrients, he said.
Leaving the leaf material on the fields does have negative impacts on the growing and harvesting of sugar cane, though. The perennial plant can grow multiple crop yields from one planting to regrow its next, also known as a ratoon crop, explained associate professor of agronomy at University of Florida Hardev Sandhu. With later-season ratoon crops, Sandhu and his colleagues found that there was reduced yield of sugar cane due to leafy trash being left on the soil. He also noted that leaf trash can prevent some solar radiation from reaching the soil.
However, there are opportunities to turn unused leaf trash into other products. Wood said that sugar cane leaf material can be used to generate electricity at the processing mill, as is the case at many Brazilian facilities. Wood added that mills in Australia and Brazil had to change how they processed sugar cane to account for the increased volume of material coming in. He said that some mills initially pushed back against the shift to green harvesting but later adjusted.
Minor adjustments are already taking place in Florida. Tellus, a paper products company jointly owned by Florida Crystals Corporation, American Sugar Refining, Inc., and the business organization Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, turns bagasse—or what’s leftover after sugar cane production—into plates and bowls at a processing facility in Belle Glade. The technology of turning this cane byproduct into other products has been around for a century. Back in the 1920s when sugar was planted en masse in Florida, bagasse was turned into construction materials. The companies behind Tellus also market their products as “sustainable” and environmentally friendly. Advocates say that leaf trash is yet another opportunity for sugar companies to turn crop waste into a marketable product while truly fulfilling Tellus’ purported goal of sustainability.
Prism reached out to Tellus for comment regarding whether it’s explored other products made from leafy trash, but it did not respond by publication time.
Other companies have also sought partnerships with Florida sugar companies to make use of green harvesting byproducts. Shiva Vencat, the CEO of Verde Visions, a company that develops technology to make low-sulfur, low-carbon diesel, said that he was in discussions with Florida sugar company employees in 2018 to make use of the bagasse material. Vencat told Prism he and his colleagues read about how the cane burning practice pollutes surrounding communities.
“They have a problem, and we have the solution, and that’s why we chose Florida,” Vencat said.
The CEO said his company was looking for financing to build a processing facility, but the talks fell apart not long after they began.
Kenneth Gravois, a sugar cane specialist at the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, said that companies prefer to burn the external leaves for efficiency because it means the cane is harvested quickly and processed at the mill with ease.
But even with burning’s supposed ease for industry, Christine Louis-Jeune said it seems that sugar companies in Florida are already implementing greener practices at a small scale. Louis-Jeune is a junior at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University majoring in environmental science, as well as an organizer with the Stop the Burn-Go Green Campaign in the Glades communities.
The trouble, Louis-Jeune said, is that companies are beginning to green harvest closer to communities where residents are majority white. It’s challenging to stay patient while they conduct business as usual, she said—especially given the history of government agencies and companies prioritizing the requests of white communities over those of Black communities.
In addition to the lawsuit, the campaign is hosting rallies, canvassing Glades neighborhoods, and trying to build strength in numbers. She and other organizers want to have a public conversation with the sugar companies and have invited leaders to engage in a discussion, but she said Stop the Burn-Go Green hasn’t heard a response yet.
“We’re bringing those messages to life so that they can see that we’re not asking them to compromise their business,” Louis-Jeune said. “They are a multibillion-dollar industry, [and] this is something that they already do. We are just asking them to make a bit more adjustments so that our residents don’t have to compromise their health.”
