South Louisiana Family Has Long History With Sugarcane

The Bain family of Bunkie, Louisiana has always been known for their progressive attitude toward farming. Sterling Bain Sr., the deceased patriarch of Bain Farms in Avoyelles/Rapides, was always at the forefront of technological innovation. You can ask any of his sons and grandsons who followed him into the fields.

 Roger Bain, John Bain, Tommy Webb, Will Bain, Buster Bain, Edgar Bain, David Bain, and Jared Bain. (Sam Irwin photo).

"He was leveling his land before that ever became a thing,” said Sterling Bain Jr., better known as Buster. "Daddy didn’t mind a drought because he could clean out the ditches and improve drainage. He believed a drought could hurt you, but flooded fields were ten times worse.”

Buster and his brothers, John, Edgar and Roger along with nephews Will Bain, David Bain, Tommy Webb and Jared Bain gathered at the farm office a stone’s throw from Bayou Boeuf to talk about their farming heritage.

Son John Bain marveled at his father’s ability to make things work on the farm.

"Daddy saw everything from the mule to today’s technology which is about as wide as you can go,” he said. "For thousands of years not much changed in farming but during the last 75, the world changed. We say all the time we wished our grandparents were here to see as far as we’ve come but daddy saw all the change.”

John said Sterling Sr. got into cotton and cattle with his step-father, Clyde Smith, but it was father-in-law E. L. Lyles that sold him on sugarcane. John said E. L. didn’t exactly welcome the tractor onto the farm. 

"My grandfather got a tractor and didn’t like it. He told the men to put it in the barn and stick with the mules. When daddy joined his father-in-law on the farm a year later, he told the workers they were going to learn how to farm with a tractor. E. L. knew daddy would do the work, so he let him go.”

Sterling Sr. passed away in 2006 at the age of 76 but he recognized the value of sugarcane farming especially during the sugar rationing years of World War II.

"Everyone went broke during the Depression, but our grandfather (E. L. Lyles) built a syrup mill on the farm and began cooking syrup and sold it to a variety of customers,” John said. "That changed their world and they came out of the war pretty good.”

The older generation of Bain farmers delivered their sugarcane to the Meeker Sugar Refinery a few miles up the road in Meeker. By the time Sterling Sr. took over the farm in the 1940s he must have thought the Meeker mill would keep running forever, after all it was built in 1912 and had a good customer for its syrup with Crackerjacks, the famous caramel popcorn and peanuts snack food.

"But Crackerjacks pulled out,” Buster said. "The area farmers made a deal to form a co-op in the late 1940s. That’s when daddy got into cane farming. Daddy got involved with the mill and the (American Sugar Cane) League but the co-op closed for good in 1981. By that time, me and my brothers had all returned to the farm. We would’ve liked to stay in sugarcane farming, but we had no choice but to quit.”

And just like that, the Bain farming operation had to make their living with soybeans, rice and corn. The Bain brothers are good farmers and they’ve got great ice cream land along Bayou Boeuf, but there’s a reason sugarcane continues to be farmed in Louisiana for more than 200 years: its reliable, it can take a lot of abuse and still turn in a decent harvest.

"The whole decade of the 1980s people were going broke farming grain,” said Roger Bain, the youngest of the Sterling Sr.’s boys.

John chimed in. "A lot of farmers were happy to go into soybeans because they said, ‘Hey, we don’t have to work in the winter and deal with all that mud.’ But the price was up one year and then it dropped and stayed low.”

Sugarcane, like many industries, works best on an economy of scale and sugar mills in the 1980s began to understand they needed more cane to be able to turn a profit. The Bains recognized this; so did Alma Sugar Mill down in the New Roads area.

"Alma had to make a decision to either throw in the towel or build up their mill. Alma began to expand the mill and we got back in the sugarcane business,” said Roger.

There was adversity. The 1989 freeze wiped out the Bain’s early crop, but they bounced back, and things have been running smoothly, at least as smoothly as a 5,000 acre sugarcane, rice and soybean farm can.

Buster, at age 69, has been retired from farming for five years and his nephew Will manages the sugarcane operation. The rice and soybean operations are also an integral part of the farm and each crop has 1,700 acres planted. 

Will and David’s father, also named Bill, had the opportunity to farm alongside Sterling Sr. and his brothers but passed away in 2008. Brothers John, Edgar and Roger are still at it, but the next generation is moving up and waiting for their opportunity just like E. L., Clyde and Sterling Sr. did all those years ago.

"I’ve been gone a few years but the farm has never been in better shape,” said Buster.