"Sugar..uh uh uh uh uh uh uh, honey honey.."

Back in February the electrical students from the Centre were scheduled to go on a field trip to the Sugar Estate, specifically the factory, especially to check out the electrical equipment. Extra chaperones were needed and the Centre thought we may enjoy the tour. They were right and I was more than happy to help out and get to learn a few things in the process. I'm going to do my best here to walk you through the process step by step. The pictures are almost exactly in the order of the way the tour was conducted, so they should follow the process fairly well. I was very intrigued by the entire process.

This is the group I helped watch. The boys were split into two groups: one group went with Katie and Terry on Wednesday, the other group went with myself and Hemdath on Friday. The guys really behaved themselves well. I didn't have to do too much chasing or correcting.

This is right before we entered. Basically a snapshot of the shell of the factory.

Employee parking. Guess they've figured out that bikes=good exercise and less air polution.

This picture shows the punts. The punts are those large, numbered barge looking things floating in the canal. The process reminds me of a water ride in some ways. The punts go into the fields (the canals are all connected in a network/grid that leads right back to the factory), are filled up with raw cane, the punts travel back to the factory and get dumped onto a feeding bed, then they move back out to the fields. In the fields there are somewhere around 2400 men cutting the cane with cutlasses. From there a tractor hauls it to the canal's edge and dumps the load into the punt. Unless it's been raining and it's too muddy that is. In that case the workers just carry bundles to the punt and fill it up.

This is a view of the feeding bed from underneath. You can see the chains that keep the cane moving, it's conveyor belt style. We walked directly underneath this. It was a good thing we had our hard hats on--one of the boys had a large piece of cane fall directly onto his head. This feeder dumps the raw cane into a cane carrier, which then starts feeding the cane into three sets of knives or blades which start to cut, rip, and shred the cane in order to extract everything.

These are the second and third sets of blades it travels through. Check out the left side of the picture, the wooden loong box is where the cane continues on. One interesting fact I learned is that 12 tons of raw cane yields about 1 ton of sugar.

This looked like a picture Dad or Uncle Marty (or anyone who has half a clue about that kind of stuff) might enjoy. It was the motor and shaft for the blades that chop up the cane. No safety restrictions in this place. It's pretty free in there...and dangerous for some I suppose. We lived, nobody was hurt.

The reason we even came.

Again, the boys learning a lot about their field of interest.

Okay, from the chopping up of the cane the small pieces go into mill #1 and eventually pass through 4 seperate mills. I think this is the third mill. Hot water is mixed with the cane to loosen the juices and separate the cane juice from the "bagasse" (left over saw dust stuff). The factory goes through 2000 tons of cane juice daily. Also, 94% of the cane juice is extracted from the bagasse in the end.

Another view of the mills, this is the fourth, obviously. Third directly behind it, etc.

This is just what I thought was a cool picture of some of the machinery.

After the juice is extracted and the bagasse cannot be used any further for sugar, it is dumped from the fourth mill onto another conveyor belt that proceeds to an elevator. The elevator sends it on its way to the furnaces. There are three furnaces with two shoots to feed bagasse into for each one. The furnace boils water and the plant is pretty much run on steam. I was able to peer into one of these furnaces. I'm glad I'm not going to hell.

Excess bagasse is obviously dumped here. It's saved for problem times when the company needs to keep operating, but has no new bagasse coming in to burn. There is a tractor lift I didn't take a picture of, but you get the idea. Pretty much a reverse back to the furnaces.

Back to the sweet stuff. The juice heads to these large drums to be clarified. Think mini swimming pool in your yard. Okay, not too mini. Interesting note: all signs in the factory are hand painted. I liked this sign especially. I encourage you to read through their checklist, I found it interesting. The limed juice is added to the mixture along with a settling agent (can't remember the name of it) to draw out impurities. I was told the juice is the heated to 320 degrees C.

And now testing the clarity of the juice.

Next step: evaporation process. And they keep on boiling it down and condensing, moving to three different huge drums for this process, until....
Pay dirt! This was awesome! See all that brown stuff? It's the chute of freshly produced brown sugar. Everyone got to taste it, as much as they wanted actually. Grandma, you would have loved the sanitation codes: dip hand in and take as much as you please. Didn't wash? Eh, it's okay. The vat this sugar is dumped into holds 80 tons of the sweet stuff.
This was a further step in the process. This company doesn't produce refined sugar or even very white sugar, but this spinning drum was removing molasses from some of the sugar. It was pretty cool to watch.
The group at the end of the tour.
This is the brand new factory that hasn't started production as of yet. The old one we got to tour is basically history. This one should be running soon, but there are some hang-ups with financing, etc. Apparently the one in charge of all of this is in some hot water with the new plant. I don't know details. Anyway, I hope this was as enjoyable for you to walk through in pictures as it was for me in person!