AND SHANE HAZEL.
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♪ontents of my bulging grocery bag
♪ ♪
onto my bed and ate about 10 pounds of candy.
It was a bacchanalia.
There were Tastykakes, Ring Dings, Ho Hos,
candy corn, licorice, $100,000 Bars,
Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Zagnuts, peanut butter cups,
more candy corn.
Once I started, I couldn’t stop because my 11-year-old self
had not yet embraced the whole concept
of everything in moderation.
And to be honest, I’m still not sure that I have.
Last night, down at the local diner,
that second piece at pecan pie; delicious, not necessary.
Anyway, this episode of "How America Works"
is all about American sugar,
and the incredible amount of it we consume
every single year.
Relax, there’ll be no lectures,
no sugar shaming in this episode.
Just an honest look at how big, big sugar is,
and the impact it has on our economy overall.
And what it takes to satisfy
our nation’s insatiable sweet tooth.
Along the way, you’ll meet a few of the men and women
on the front lines of this multi-billion dollar industry.
And you’ll see firsthand what they do to make sure
that you and I have the option,
the option of indulging ourselves from time to time
with the occasional slice of pecan pie or two.
This is "How America Works."
(light music)
There’s no denying it.
America has a serious sweet tooth.
So much so, we actually consume more sugar per capita
than anywhere else in the world.
We also make a fair amount of it,
nearly nine million tons per year.
Or about enough to fill a pixie stick
stretching from Saturn back to earth.
And though more than half of that comes from beets
grown across the nation,
the most sought after sugar comes from cane.
And there’s not a state in the union that grows more of that
than sunny Florida.
Here in the heart of cane country,
companies like U.S. Sugar run 24/7 to fill
a full 10% of nationwide demand.
But just last night, some unseasonable weather flung them
head long into damage control.
- [Reporter] Right now, hard freeze is happening
for central Florida through this morning.
Temperatures could drop to 28 degrees or below,
and it has in some cases, really chilly.
- [Mike] It’s the worst cold snap here in over a decade,
and a detriment to the sugar cane, which once frostbitten,
will rapidly degrade into unusable product
in a matter of days.
So, it’s on guys like Production Supervisor, Jay Baez,
to harvest all they can before it’s too late.
- It’s made things even crazier than it already is.
We’re having to go out there and check cane.
We have to take care of it now because if you don’t
you’ll start losing the sugar, the content in there.
- [Mike] To salvage the crop,
Jay and his fellow harvesters will need to cut and haul
nearly 40,000 tons of cane by sundown.
And to that end, he’ll be manning one of U.S. Sugar’s
200 plus wagons,
responsible for catching the freshly cut cane.
- [Jay] We’re about to meet up with this harvester
and start picking up some of this cane.
You see we’ve got three wagons behind us.
He’ll start from the front wagon,
the one closest to the tractor,
and we work our way back to the three.
- [Mike] By using this method,
Jay and his colleagues can run the harvester nonstop,
while wagons tag in and out of collecting the cane.
But while on deck, they must also keep a sharp eye
on their driving.
- You’ve got to be paying attention all the time.
You’ve got to be in sync with the operator next to you,
with the tractor with you,
the wagons are dragging behind you
’cause anything can go wrong.
- [Mike] Lucky for Jay,
his latest run is gone off without a hitch.
And with three wagons now brimming with sugar cane,
it’s time to shuttle it to rail cars waiting nearby.
- We actually haul all of our cane to the mill via train.
We load the cane into the back of there
and they go to the mill and they stump ’em there.
But here we have over 300 miles of railroad
that we move our crop to the mill with.
- [Mike] That 300 miles of railroad also comes equipped
with 32 loading stations.
And once at the nearest one,
it’s simply a matter of transferring Jay’s latest haul.
- Get that cane in that elevator nice and easy.
You don’t want to dump it too fast.
You dump it too fast, you can actually choke that thing up
if you’re not careful.
Now we’re all done.
We’re gonna get off this ramp and head back to the field
and go get another load.
- [Mike] But it seems that last night’s frost
has other more pressing plans for Jay and his wagon.
(phone ringing)
- Hey, man. - I know you’re busy,
but we got a block that, it’s gotta go today, man.
It’s degrading very fast, so.
- All right, sir.
No, we’ll take care of it.
- [Mike] Jay knows all too well that certain parts
of the crop can be more damaged than others.
And with this one, apparently in the worst shape of all,
it’ll have to take top priority.
- The cane will actually start to rot
right there in the field.
It can get to where there’s no sucrose in there.
And we’re in the business of growing cane,
not letting it rot in the field, so.
(light dramatic music)
- [Mike] 12 Miles away at U.S. Sugar’s production plant,
dozens of rail cars are already pouring in
from far and wide.
Each of them filled to the brim with 30 tons
worth of sugar cane.
And getting all that product from those cars to conveyors
is the job of mill worker Leonard Sampson.
- Definitely one of the most challenging jobs,
’cause you gotta be alert.
And there’s a lot of things you have to pay attention to,
a lot of moving parts.
Anything can happen at any moment.
- [Mike] That’s mainly because Leonard oversees a process
involving crushing wheels, flying chains,
and walls of falling sugar cane.
And with about 150 rail cars to dump before quitting time,
you can also add tight deadlines to today’s challenges.
But with 10 years of experience,
Leonard comes well equipped to handle all that and more.
- When I come to work, I got my mind clear.
I make sure I get in sleep because I gotta be active.
Anything can happen at any moment.
You have to be on your Ps and Qs.
- [Mike] And that starts from the moment a rail car
pulls into Leonard’s station and onto the aptly named
"dump table."
- Actually it works like a hydraulic lift.
There’s two scales underneath it.
Once the hooks come up on it, the table’s gonna raise.
It’s gonna weigh the car out.
It’s gonna go back down.
Once it weighs out, it’s gonna automatically dump it.
- [Mike] Since standing under a floodgate of sugar cane
would be ill advised for anyone,
Leonard relies on a set of three chains
to pop each door open before dumping.
- Once the car’s finished dumping,
I’m gonna pull these chains back.
Once I grab these chains,
I’m gonna hit my "A" button on my remote,
which it turns and triggers the actuator
to move this car on the table.
- [Mike] It’s a system custom created
for maximum speed and efficiency, but from time to time,
Leonard still has to help it along.
- The two back doors didn’t pop.
’Cause now I’m gonna have to pop the third door manually.
Come on, man. (light dramatic music)
- [Mike] Luckily though, it’s a fairly common occurrence,
with a fairly straightforward fix.
- So I had to go out and rehook that chain.
(door clanking)
That’s gonna happen a lot.
On a typical day, you got constant errors
and you gotta be able to deal with those error
as well as keeping the carrier full
to keep the mill grinding cane.
- [Mike] Once fed into the mill,
the cane is sent through a series of shredders and rollers
that break it up and squeeze sugar juice
from the remaining fiber.
From there, that juice is boiled down and condensed
into a thick syrup before being further condensed
into crystals.
Now, you’ve got raw brown sugar,
but for the finer white stuff,
there’s a whole nother process known as refining.
And if ever there was a man to head that up,
it’s second generation Refinery Manager, Billy Dyess.
- [Billy] I started in the sugar industry at the age of 18,
working with my father.
One of the greatest men in sugar that I’ve known.
He taught me everything that I know today.
- [Mike] For Billy, that education started with the basics
of how sugar is refined.
And that works something like this:
First, raw sugar is mixed with hot water to produce
what’s known as liquor.
Then, that liquor is filtered to remove any non-soluble
stuff like dirt and other impurities.
From there, it’s evaporated down into a very specific
and uniform type of crystal before being sent through
a centrifuge to separate those crystals
from the remaining molasses.
And there you go, raw to refined in just eight hours time.
Only here, Billy and his colleagues
do it on a massive scale.
- [Billy] Our refinery produces five and a half million
pounds of refined sugar a day.
Our demand or our target production
is because everybody needs sugar.
- [Mike] But as Billy’s about to find out
there’s already trouble brewing in the filtration system.
Something that one of his coworkers has noticed
in the main control room.
- What we got going on, bud?
- We’re losing a lot of flow.
It’s going through the pipe right now.
- Scratch the sample bottles, go check each of the filters
till we figure out which one it is.
- [Mike] A loss of flow typically means
that one of the six filters in this system
has somehow become compromised.
And to find out which one,
they’ll need to take some test samples.
- Let’s go ahead and catch number five first.
Catch it till we find an issue.
- [Mike] While inspecting the liquor,
Billy will be looking for telltale signs
of a damaged filter, which typically just means
anything that isn’t perfectly clear.
- Ah, that looks pretty clear.
I think we’re good there. - Yeah.
- All right, number two.
- [Mike] And it doesn’t take long to narrow down
where this issue lies.
- There it is.
I already see the black specs.
See the black specs floating around in here?
This liquor should be clear.
There should be nothing in it.
Any solids that are in this liquor,
it will actually block the syrup which builds the pressure,
which creates an even bigger mess.
- [Mike] To keep that from happening,
Billy will need to shut down the system
and inspect the filtration screens,
also known as leaves, inside.
- We’ve gotta get a crew together,
get this filter safely locked out, open it up,
find the problem and fix it.
Every second this is down,
this is raw sugar I’m not melting,
which in turn is refined sugar I’m not producing.