Rained Out

I didn't take the above picture on the way to Kula today to stroll in the botanical gardens, but it looks a lot like the small streams we passed as down pours hit us after driving from the drier side around toward Kahului and up on the shoulders of Haleakala Volcano.  We decided to turn around and explore indoors at the Sugar Mill museum instead.

The last sugar mill closed two years ago, but the museum honoring the industry (especially the Alexander and Baldwin company) is interesting.  At the time of closing, the process of growing, harvesting, and processing sugar had been automated considerably.  In recent times, cane fields were burned to remove the leafy cane foliage, and the sugar stalks (unharmed by the burning) were mechanically gathered up with large collectors whose contents in turn dumped into huge conveyance bins via a large crane-and-grabber; then, next the ENTIRE bin was crane-and-grappled into the mill conveyance system for separating the stones and rocks, rinsing the stalks and continuing into the process of making sugar.  This latter process of chopping, grinding, dissolving, condensing, etc, was all done via computer programs that monitored and directed the process with only a few humans overseeing the computers (with of course other humansmaintaining the heavy duty equipment that did the actual  work).

Sugar cane takes 14 to 18 months to mature and planters staggered cultivation so that the cane did not all mature at once. In the early days, planting the cane was labor intensive as trenches were dug by hand, and canes planted. Thirty men using hoes could plant two acres in a day. When the cane was ripe, workers cut the sugar cane by hand with broad curved machetes and loaded the stems onto carts. Mills were also slow and inefficient in the early years, so more workers were needed--and many workers from diverse cultures were imported to work sugar cane. Mechanism at first came gradually, but by the year 1959, sugar plantations in Hawaii employed one out of every 12 people in the State. Its agricultural workers were among the highest-paid in the world. At one time there were large sugar plantations and mills on Oahu, Maui, Kauai Molokai and the Big Island of Hawaii.

In 1980, Hawaii supplied about one-tenth of the sugar in the US. But the industry saw a severe decline that began in the 1990’s. This was because it became less expensive to grow sugar elsewhere. The last company that grew sugar in Hawaii ended operations in 2016, here on Maui.