There were several farmers in my county who made syrup every year. Some of them would leave the "skimmings" in the syrup kettle after the syrup making process. It would ferment, and some of the help who lived on or near the farm would stay drunk on it for weeks. You would see some of them in town on Saturday afternoon, looking absolutely terrible. That stuff was supposed to cause a terrible hangover.
My uncle used to tell the story of how a man he knew made the mistake of letting his skimmin's sit too long before feeding them to his hogs. He said the hogs all got so drunk they couldn't stand up and rolled over on their backs with their legs in the air.
The story may not be true, but it sure leaves a funny picture in my imagination.
The real work with sugar cane was the harvest. We first had to go through the field and strip off the leaves using machetes. I don't know why we didn't do everything at once, but I do remember we had so many leaves between the rows that it was hard to walk. I think the idea may have been to let the cane mature awhile and produce a higher sugar content.
Next, we came back and topped the cane in preparation for harvest. The harvest consisted of driving a tractor with a trailer beside the rows while cutting the cane off at the ground level and piling it onto the trailer.
One of the final jobs was saving your seed cane until the next year. We built a ground pit and put in a 6" layer of cane followed by a layer of leaves and tops for an airspace. We kept building layers this way until the pile was about 3' tall and then we covered the whole thing with dirt. At planting time the next season, we opened the seed cane pit and planted the cane. I'm not sure, but I seem to remember cutting sections of the stalks with eyes on them rather than just laying the whole cane stalk down in a row.
Normally, we would plant in a different location each year and let our stubble from the previous year also sprout. The stubble wouldn't produce cane as big as the new crop, but it was no work to plant and produced a fair crop.
Did I mention pumping water out of a neighbor's pond with a trash pump for irrigation and also pumping from a fresh water spring? Well. . . . I'll save that. I'm way too longwinded on this subject already.
