Sweet Sarina

<Rémi>
We travelled to Sarina.  Sarina is just near Mackay.

We have come a long way since leaving the Green's farm

This is sugarcane country.  Nearly every paddock is filed with cane.

 

 

 People even have their houses in the middle of the cane!

95% of Australia's sugar cane is grown in Queensland, so we decided to visit a sugar mill to find out how the cane is turned into sugar.
Sugar cane needs lots of water and sunshine to grow.  The cane is 70% water.  This is why sugar cane is grown in hot, wet North Queensland.

Cane harvesting has only just started and sugar mill tours at big sugar mills do not begin for another month, so we visited a miniature sugar mill called the Sugar Shed.

At the Sugar Shed, they showed us how cane is grown and harvested.


Sugar cane grows to about 2m tall.
Here is Zeke next to it to show how tall it is.


The cane is harvested using a harvested like the one below.

When the cane is harvested, it is cut into 30cm lengths called billets. 

The billets are loaded into a tractor bin.
 
They are then tipped into wire basket cane carriages like those below.




The cane billets are transported to the sugar mill by funny little trains with the wire basket carriages like the ones below.

As cane is 70% water, it dries out very quickly.  To prevent it drying out, it needs to be delivered to the mill within 16 hours of harvesting.  Because of this, the mills need to be near to where the cane is harvested.  We have seen lots of sugar mills around North Queensland so that they are close to the cane fields. 

 One of the sugar mills we passed.

This is the big sugar mill in Sarina.

The little trains delivery the cane directly to the mill so their are little train-lines everywhere.

 

We have even had to stop on crossings for them to pass.

 

At the Sugar Shed, they showed us how the cane is crushed (milled) to get the sugar juice out.
The cane is crushed in the mill using big rollers to squeeze the juice out, just like a big version of the one below.

The left over cane is very fibrous..

We tasted the juice - it was really nice and not too sweet.

The juice is then dried and the water evaporated off to make crystals of sugar.  At this point, molasses surrounds the sugar crystals until it is washed off.  Molasses is black and tastes yuk!

To make treacle, the molasses is washed and to make golden syrup the treacle is washed again.  Surprising really, since molasses is so disgusting but golden syrup is delicious.

Sugar, caster sugar and icing sugar are all the same product but they just have different size crystals.
This is what the raw sugar from the Sugar shed looks like.

All raw sugar is white.  To get coffee sugar and brown sugar they just re-coat the white sugar with molasses.  The more molasses, the darker it gets.

Sugar cane is a naturally recyclable and environmentally friendly crop in a number of ways.

1) To grow sugar cane, the cane is harvested (chopped off near the ground) and within a month it re-sprouts - easy, no planting of seeds required.

2) One of the by products of milling sugar cane is called bagasse.  It is the chopped up fibre left over after crushing.

The bagasse is used to fuel the steam turbines at the mill and there is enough to produce more power than what the sugar mill needs to process the cane.  The residual power is put into the local grid.  sugar cane is the only crop in the world that can power its own processing rather than relying on a different fuel source.

3)  The molasses can be used to make other products like rum and ethanol.  It is also used as animal feed as well as a fertiliser for the sugar cane crops.


At the end of the tour all the kids (and Mum) had fairy floss.  We learnt that fairy floss is just coloured sugar, that is heated and spun fast until the sugar crystals stretch out to be really long.

 

 

The tour was good, but this was my favourite part!