Harvest 2025: A Season to Work and Celebrate

By  Cheryl Michelet

Sugar News

If you have been anywhere near a cane field lately, you can feel it. The trucks are on the road before daylight, steam from the mills is back in the air and harvest season is officially underway. After a long summer of waiting, planning and watching the weather, growers and millers have finally started the grinding season. There is a rhythm to this time of year that is familiar to everyone in the agriculture industry.

Just before the Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival, our board of directors held a meeting in New Iberia. It gave growers a rare chance to catch up with each other during harvest. You could walk through the room and hear the same two questions repeated from group to group: “Have you started yet?” and “Have you gotten any rain?” That pretty well sums up the fall conversation in Louisiana’s cane country because those two things tell the story of every harvest.

As for this year’s crop, conditions have been mixed but generally favorable. The year began with a rare snowfall and two freezes, followed by adequate rain in spring and early summer and now a dry spell that has turned to drought in some areas. Still, the cane looks good in most parishes and harvest season began with a sense of optimism and a little impatience for those who couldn’t wait to get started.

The festival itself once again brought growers, families and communities together to celebrate the oldest and most historic sugar producing area in the nation. Sugarcane first arrived in Louisiana 254 years ago, in 1751. As part of the annual celebration of that event, Queen Sugar, Olivia Daigle of West Baton Rouge Parish, was crowned and will serve as the industry’s ambassador in the year ahead. She carries on a proud tradition that honors both the history and the future of Louisiana sugarcane, and she will spend the next year helping others understand what sugar means to our state.

This year, there is evidence that the public is rediscovering what we have known all along. Recent surveys show that more and more consumers prefer real sugar over artificial sweeteners. People want authenticity in their food, and they are paying closer attention to where ingredients come from. That shift matters to us because every pound of sugar that leaves Louisiana mills comes from real people working in real fields.

There is one change worth noting this month. National Real Sugar Day, which has been recognized on October 14, is now officially set for October 15 of each year so that it no longer falls on a national holiday or coincides with the newly designated National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk. This change is important because it gives sugar its own place on the United States calendar and allows the industry to keep telling our story in a clear and consistent way.

So, as the harvesters roll and trucks head toward the mills, we can take pride in knowing that Louisiana sugar continues to make a significant impact on our state’s economy and in kitchens across the nation.