By Amy Green, Inside Climate News
Growing research suggests that “black snow,” a byproduct of the sugarcane harvest, is harming residents’ health. The politically powerful sugar growers say the air quality meets standards.
BELLE GLADE, Fla.—Of all the cane sugar produced in the United States, half of it originates in a remote area of Florida’s heartland, where from fall to spring the fires burn.
The region south of Lake Okeechobee, the state’s largest lake, is among the nation’s most bountiful, raising rice, sod, vegetables such as lettuce, celery and corn and most notably sugarcane, making Florida the country’s top producer of the crop.
The cane is harvested through a process that begins with fire.
Whole fields are set ablaze with the purpose of incinerating the grassy leaves that sprout from the bamboo-like stalks, which themselves are full of water and do not burn. The fires concentrate the sugar content within the stalks through evaporation, while emitting large plumes of smoke that rain black ash across three counties. Residents call the ash “black snow.”
A growing body of research indicates the smoke and ash are poisoning the people, predominantly low-income people of color, who live and work among the cane fields.
By one estimate nearly 40 percent of the residents in Belle Glade, where the motto is “Her Soil is Her Fortune,” live in poverty. State restrictions, implemented in 1991 after a deluge of complaints from the wealthier suburbs of Palm Beach, home to Mar-a-Lago, prohibit the burns when the winds blow east in their direction. As a result, the smoke has been concentrated within the region known as the Everglades Agricultural Area ever since. For decades complaints from residents here have gone ignored.
In Los Angeles people wore masks as this winter’s wildfires engulfed their city to guard against the toxic air, but few here take that precaution. Because here the fires are a way of life.
“It’s your typical case of environmental injustice,” said Christine Louis-Jeune, a 22-year-old Florida A&M University student who was born and raised in Belle Glade.
One study that examined the region’s air quality found the fires and smoke were responsible for a hot spot of PM2.5, pollution composed of particles 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair, tiny enough to penetrate deep within the lungs. The study concluded that in south Florida the pollution can lead to some 2.5 deaths annually and estimated that within the Everglades Agricultural Area, the mortality rate was 10 times higher than that in the nearby coastal cities.
“Anything that adds fine particles to the atmosphere is likely to cause an increase in mortality,” said Christopher Holmes, associate professor of earth, ocean and atmospheric science at Florida State University and a co-author of the study.
PM2.5 pollution is linked with lung and other cancers, cardiopulmonary disease and premature death. In the Everglades Agricultural Area the crop burn emissions are comparable with those of all the vehicles in the state, if the vehicles were concentrated here, the study said. Florida’s PM2.5 emissions from crop fires are the highest of any state, primarily because of the fires in this region. Some 18 percent of Florida’s residents live in counties with significant crop burning.
“This is America, and we should be living the American dream here, of being able to have a quality of life that our children’s children children want,” said Colin Walkes, 52, a former mayor of Pahokee who grew up in the area and with his wife raised his family here. “We don’t have that now. Our children don’t want this. They don’t want to be here.”
“We Don’t Believe We Have to Die”
Florida’s sugar industry maintains the air quality in the Everglades Agricultural Area meets Environmental Protection Agency standards.
One recent report from U.S. Sugar, a company responsible for nearly 10 percent of all the sugar produced in the country, cited data from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and Florida Department of Health, based on monitoring stations in Belle Glade, Royal Palm Beach and Delray Beach. The report said the company was partnering with Tuskegee University and Florida A&M University, both historically Black schools, to produce a more thorough environmental study and economic analysis on the region, to address community concerns.
“Florida’s sugarcane growers are careful stewards of the land, air and water resources,” reads a statement the Florida Sugarcane Farmers, an industry group, provided to Inside Climate News. “Locally, prescribed pre-harvest sugarcane burning helps ensure worker safety and reduces the risk of uncontrolled wildfires. The process is heavily permitted and monitored by the state and industry, which has for years provided public reporting showing our farming area has among the best air quality in the state of Florida.”
Nonetheless a series of stories published in 2021 by ProPublica and The Palm Beach Post revealed that for several years the monitoring station in Belle Glade had been malfunctioning. The state Department of Environmental Protection, in a statement to Inside Climate News, characterized the monitor as a “non-regulatory instrument” that provided real-time data but was not used for regulatory determinations. The department said it has since been replaced with a regulatory monitor, and that the air quality in the region meets standards. Royal Palm Beach and Delray Beach are east of the Everglades Agricultural Area and protected from the burns when the winds blow in their direction.
“Florida has one of the nation’s most comprehensive air quality monitoring networks, designed to provide the public with accurate data, and it meets or exceeds federal requirements under the Clean Air Act,” according to the department’s statement.
The news stories also showed that the federal and state regulatory framework for measuring the pollution failed to capture the full impact of the crop fires, because the framework was based on 24-hour and annual averages, even though the crop fires lasted only for short durations of 30 minutes or less. The reporting, including an analysis of data collected by multiple sensors the news organizations deployed in the region, found repeated spikes in PM2.5 coinciding with the burns. Reporters also found that hospitalizations and emergency room visits for respiratory illnesses escalated in Belle Glade during the burn season.
“Yes, the air quality is certainly not as impaired as in some other major cities,” said Holmes of the pollution in the region. “However there are enough fine particles that we expect there to be some harmful health effects, including deaths.”
A separate study found that nationwide, people of color were disproportionately exposed to PM2.5 and characterized the pollution as the largest environmental cause of human mortality.
The Biden administration announced last year it would strengthen the ambient air quality standards for PM2.5 and said the new standards would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays. The EPA also said the monitoring network for measuring the pollution would be modified to account for the disparities along racial lines. Challenges are expected under the new Trump administration, said Elizabeth Bechard, public health manager at Moms Clean Air Force, an advocacy group focused on air quality and climate change.
“We know that wildfire smoke is getting worse, and to me I think that underlines the importance of controlling the sources of PM2.5 that we can control,” she said. “We aren’t going to be able to control all the sources, but where we can address public health we should.”
In the Everglades Agricultural Area the fires emit other pollutants such as benzene and formaldehyde, which are linked with leukemia and cancers of the nose and throat, according to separate research commissioned by the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group that has been particularly active on the issue. The research noted crop burning in general is a known contributor to surface ozone and regional haze events. Surface ozone can trigger asthma attacks, worsen emphysema and contribute to other respiratory problems, the research said.
Crop burns are also a source of black carbon, a component of PM2.5 and short-lived climate pollutant that has a significantly more potent warming effect than carbon dioxide. In the Everglades Agricultural Area, sugarcane production accounts for outsized greenhouse gas emissions, although the vast majority of the emissions are related to drainage and soil oxidation and loss, according to a separate study commissioned by the Everglades Foundation, an advocacy group. That study found the crop fires were responsible for only a small portion of the emissions, which are warming the global climate and leading to hotter temperatures, rising seas and more damaging hurricanes.
The residents of the Everglades Agricultural Area have found little recourse for their plight. A federal class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 on their behalf was dropped three years later after the Legislature changed the state law to protect the politically powerful sugar industry from legal challenges over air pollution. The lawsuit claimed the fires and smoke not only exposed people here to multiple pollutants, they also contaminated their properties. The litigation called for the court to stop the burns and initiate a medical monitoring program funded by the industry.
A separate petition filed in 2023 by the Sierra Club called on the Biden administration to investigate whether the fires constituted a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, because of the Florida Forest Service’s practice of authorizing the burns based on whether the winds would blow toward the underserved communities of the Everglades Agricultural Area or more affluent suburbs of Palm Beach. The petition never elicited a response, said Patrick Ferguson, senior organizing representative for the Sierra Club’s Stop the Burn Campaign. The Florida Forest Service said no one was available to comment; the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“It’s not that we hate the sugar industry. We don’t want to close the sugar industry down,” said Kina Phillips, 50, a former nurse who has lived in South Bay all her life and raised a family here. “Our families need the jobs of the sugar industry. But we don’t believe we have to die in order for you to be here. We shouldn’t have to suffer physically, emotionally, financially.”
A Way of Life
When the fires burn and smoke and ash are in the air people stay indoors.
During the mildest months of the year in Florida they bring in their children from the playgrounds, shut their windows and run their air conditioners to circulate the air inside their homes, while the dark plumes rise from the vast green fields and drift for miles among their schools and homes and businesses, which are thinly scattered among the fields.
Louis-Jeune, the Florida A&M University student, grew up with eight siblings in a four-bedroom house. She passed the time indoors playing video games, watching television and doing chores.
“I have a big family. I can’t stay bored,” she said. “There are too many of us to be bored.”
Ras Benjahman, 78, can feel the heat of the fires inside his house, and parts of its exterior have melted. One day Walkes, the former Pahokee mayor, and his family left home for the day without closing the windows. When they returned the house was full of soot.
“The smoke just billowed into our home,” he said, “so when you came home the cabinets, the curtains, the furniture everything was full of smoke, soot and small particulate.”
Luz Torres panicked when, as a child, she saw the fires for the first time, having recently moved to the area with her family. She wondered where the firefighters were.
“I remember our little elementary school in Canal Point, looking out the window and seeing the field on fire,” said Torres, 40, who lives in Pahokee with her two children, ages 11 and 8. “I’ll never forget touching the glass and feeling the heat.”
Now as an adult she hardly would notice the burns except for the chronic asthma symptoms her youngest son has suffered since he was 3. The fires seem to aggravate his breathing problems, and every morning she administers his medicine. Sometimes he uses a nebulizer.
“I feel kind of, like, helpless,” she said. “What am I to do?”
Some people with chronic symptoms have been advised by doctors that the best remedy would be moving away, but that isn’t always easy. Al’Licia Pittman was raised in the region by a single mom. She has suffered respiratory problems and sinus infections since she was young.
“We were often told that the long-term solution was to move and try to find another area,” said Pittman, 27, who now lives in South Bay.
Others watch with anguish as their children suffer. Walkes’ 18-year-old son plays baseball, runs track and is a drummer in the school band but is lethargic when his asthma symptoms flare.
“This environment is pretty bad out here,” said Walkes, who himself experiences constant itching. “You’re attacked with so much.”
Pittman, a former teacher, recalled that some of her students would throw tantrums when respiratory symptoms kept them indoors during recess. The fires were visible through the classroom windows, and some of the children talked of becoming firefighters when they grew up. Wildlife such as snakes and rabbits, even alligators, would flee the flames.
Raising complaints has proven complicated in these communities, where the sugar industry provides an overwhelming number of jobs and also assists the local schools and health care facilities. The industry contributes $4.7 billion annually to the state’s economy and is responsible for some 19,201 jobs, according to an economic analysis by Texas A&M University provided to Inside Climate News by the industry. Some residents have found a platform with the Sierra Club, which operates a modest office in Belle Glade and itself has faced backlash from the industry.
“People that you were once close with, they pull away from you,” said Phillips, the former nurse, who got involved after noticing her patients suffered more respiratory symptoms during the burn season. Her 11-year-old grandson has used a nebulizer since he was an infant.
“Even though I have a voice I have no voice,” said Walkes, who was voted out of office after he said the sugar industry branded him a job-killing mayor. Family, friends and neighbors also have distanced themselves, he said. “That was the end of Colin Walkes as a local elected official.”
He continued: “The industry has oppressed and suppressed this area so much people just don’t want to speak up. … For me it’s frustrating as hell. You’re always lonely because no one wants to have the conversation. No one wants to organize around anything that can possibly help us to better our area and have a better quality of life.”
Steve LaPorte hopes that applying enough pressure will persuade regulators to adjust the burns, in the same way the complaints of the more affluent residents to the east did more than 30 years ago. He maintains a daily diary of the fires and file folders of his many emails with the state and local departments about the blazes. His biggest gripe is one shared by many residents here, that there is no communication about when and where the burns will occur.
“It’s impacting my property. There are people who are protected. I’m not one of them, and I’m not going to stop until I am,” said LaPorte, 60, who lives with his wife in Moore Haven. “How does one man’s right to burn allow him to trash hundreds if not thousands of people’s property worth millions of dollars? That is one unanswered question that I have a right to know.”
Torres said city commissioners were silent when she tried bringing up the issue at one meeting.
“It makes me sad,” she said. “I think that’s probably what hurts the most, they kind of ignoring it. And I guess they feel like not enough people are complaining. When enough people stand up and speak up I guess they have no other option but to look at an alternative.”
Phillips tries not to let those who have distanced themselves bother her.
“I wish they understood that they have a voice, and that it’s OK to stand against injustice,” she said. “There is power in that. There is beauty in that, to dare to be different. To dare to have a voice, to not be intimidated.”
Polluting the Water and Air
The cane is derived from the rich organic soil—some call it muck, others black gold—that accumulated over thousands of years south of Lake Okeechobee. Watered by ample rains the lake, then a mere shallow depression in the land, spilled beyond its southern shore, giving life to a vast watershed unlike any other, the Everglades.
The water coursed here among marsh vegetation that flourished and died in an endless cycle, the plant remains falling beneath the gentle current to form a fertile soil. Eventually the soil, along with subtropical climate and abundance of water, sparked the interest of farmers, who as far back as the 1880s began digging canals to drain the water and expose the soil for planting.
Florida’s sugar industry long has served as a sweet villain in the story of the delicate Everglades, even as urban centers from Orlando to Miami exert their own pressures and a massive U.S. Army Corps of Engineers effort during the last century to drain the river of grass made modern Florida possible and pushed the ecosystem to the brink. The watershed represents the state’s most important freshwater resource. A $23 billion restoration effort is among the most ambitious of its kind in human history.
The water once spanned much of the peninsula. Today some 2,200 miles of canals, 2,100 miles of levees and berms, 84 pump stations and 778 water control structures sustain the river of grass, which has been reduced to a fraction of its former self. The watershed begins in central Florida with the headwaters of the Kissimmee River and includes Lake Okeechobee, sawgrass marshes to the south and Florida Bay, at the peninsula’s southernmost tip.
The changes also made way for some 400,000 acres of sugarcane at a critical point where the river of grass once flowed and introduced nutrients in the sensitive watershed. In 1988 the federal government singled out the farmers, whose nutrient-rich fertilizers were polluting protected areas of the Everglades, in a lawsuit against the state. The litigation led in 1994 to the Everglades Forever Act, which initiated a large effort to address the pollution. The state effort is separate from a larger federal restoration plan then-President Bill Clinton implemented in 2000.
The sugar growers’ nutrient pollution is but one aspect of the watershed’s degradation, but their resistance through the years to various means of tackling the problem has sparked friction with other stakeholders in the massive federal and state effort to save the Everglades. The sugar companies have characterized some of the costs as an existential threat to their business, even as they profit from a federal price support system that boosts the price of sugar. The industry maintains its influence as one of the most generous special interest groups in agribusiness, with Florida Crystals Corp. giving nearly $3 million to federal campaigns during the 2024 election cycle and U.S. Sugar contributing more than $761,000.
Today the state has invested some $2 billion toward addressing the farmers’ pollution, by constructing vast engineered wetlands designed to replicate the natural filtering ability of the Everglades. For their part, the farmers have implemented so-called best-management practices that include measures such as altering fertilizer techniques, controlling soil erosion and increasing onsite water retention. The pollution has declined at a rate that is more than double than mandated by state law, according to the South Florida Water Management District. At least 90 percent of the Everglades’ water now meets the state standard.
Now the sugar growers are accused of contaminating the air where they farm and at least to some residents here seem to be resisting efforts to address the problem. The industry says the burns enhance harvest efficiency and make way for healthier subsequent crops. The companies say without the burns the leaf material lingering on the stalks would create bulk that would require additional rail cars for transport to the mills, causing more greenhouse gas emissions. They also say leaf trash left in the fields can hinder the regrowth of roots and stalks for the next harvest.
“We know these burns are the most egregious example of environmental injustice in Florida,” said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, an advocacy group. “The only reason it continues in Florida is because the sugar lobby is so powerful that it has made its profits a greater priority to our state policy makers than the health and wellbeing of people who live near these burns.”
Other sugarcane-growing countries have moved away from burning and embraced what proponents in Florida call “green harvesting,” where the leafy residue of the harvest is left on the soil as mulch. The now-defunct class-action lawsuit on behalf of residents in the Everglades Agricultural Area said farmers in Florida already harvest without burning when their burn permit applications are denied. The industry said the cane sometimes is harvested without burning when the smoke would disrupt sensitive places like a hospital, school or highway, but that the crop fires provide additional benefits like controlling snakes and insects.
Nonetheless, in response to community concerns the industry is experimenting with green harvesting, said Rick Roth, president of Roth Farms, a midsized operation with several thousand acres raising vegetables, rice and sugarcane. He also said the industry could look more into improving communication with residents about the fires.
“We’ve been experimenting with it for several years, and the percentage is going up,” said Roth of the green harvesting. He lives in Wellington, to the east of the Everglades Agricultural Area, and occasionally finds soot in his pool. “It’s a nuisance, and we understand that as an industry, and that is why we’re working on it.”
There is uncertainty for the region’s future. Draining the water here and exposing the soil has led to subsidence or land loss, as the plant remains combine with oxygen and the organic material breaks down. In some places more than nine feet of elevation is gone, according to one study, forcing the need to prop up some structures on stilts and raising concerns about how sustainable farming is here. Environmental groups want some of the land for Everglades restoration. Residents also worry about the sugar companies selling out to real estate developers.
“I want us to not be fearful, and I want us to just stand up and have a voice for what is right,” said Phillips, a warm woman with cascading waves of hair and a warm smile. “We don’t have an enemy in this. We just want change.”