“She goes squeeze me,
Come on and squeeze me,
Come on and squeeze me like you do-
I’m so in love with you.” The Who, 1975.
It is squeezing time in the old cane field-you would better understand that if you spent a little time with R.D. Nelson.
Seems now is the time to squeeze the sugar cane and it is time to boil the extract until it makes molasses. Sounds easy, yet according to R.D. it will just about wear you out. At least that was the consensus last Tuesday evening.
The final molasses had been drained and the vats in which the molasas was cook off are cleaned for the next round of this tasty treat used in cooking or just plain old table syrup.
In simplified terms this is how the process works. Sugar cane is ready in late October. The leaves and seeds are removed from the plants. Knowing when the the cane is ready to be processed is a simple method according to RD. It comes with experience that he learned from his Dad over 60 years ago.
The stalks are then fed into a mill where the sweet juice is collected and filtered. It is then siphoned into a larger vat before it is cooked down into molasas.
So the cooking process normally takes about 6 hours. But according to the heat that can sometimes be shortened. The rig that the men were using had a large folding smokestack and was on loan from Alcorn State University.
RD said there is a push from Alcorn to get local people back into product of crops like sugar cane. He said there are probably eight farmers around the county and there used to be many more. The problem is that no one processes the cane anymore. There was a fellow on the Simpson/ Rankin line that used mules to turn the mill but R.D. said he thought that man had died and no one was in operation any more.
So R.D. let friends and neighbors know that he was bringing the equipment to process the cane. One fellow brought cane from Vicksburg and another came from Natchez.
It is an interesting process and one that would vanish if it weren’t for people like R.D. and his friends. Even more importantly is the fact that Alcorn is helping sponsor this as well as other programs to keep small farms operational. Alcorn also teaches kid programs that make them more successful amd teach skills which seem to have become less important these days.
RD and many of his neighbors practice the community gardening concept. Sadly, he mentioned that sometimes folks expect you to do everything for them. He said when it is green time like it is now people want you to go out and pick the greeens and clean them so they can come pick up. This is not exactly what Nelson had in mind when it came to a community garden.
So once the juice is extracted from the cane it will yeild maybe 120 gallons of juice. The goal is to cook off the excess moisture. You have to keep the syrup moving all the time to prevent burning and sticking. So the goal from that 75 gallons is to produce between 15 to 20 gallons of syrup. The cook time for their rig is two to two and a half hours.
