Sugarcane Farms of Negros Occ., Part 2

Bacolod City -- Arrived here yesterday to attend the wedding of my beautiful niece, Nessa Oplas-Sy. This morning, I went to my hometown, Cadiz City to see again my parents. I stopped by some areas to take photos of the rural scenes.

Out of the 84(?) provinces of the Philippines, I would say that Negros Occidental has the most optimal land use. One will hardly see even half-hectare of idle land. Cities, housing villages, coconut, banana, tree farms and sugarcane farms. Lots of it, Hundreds of thousands of hectares of sugarcane farms.

Harvested sugarcane.

A transloading station of sugarcane trucks. The canes are unloaded from 6- or 10-wheeler trucks, weighed, then transferred to 18-wheeler trucks, to be be brought to a sugar central for refinery..

A transloading station in Manapla, about 45 kms. north of Bacolod. This is one town before Cadiz City.

Another transloading station near Caduhaan, Cadiz City.

This 18-wheeler truck full of sugarcane is a common sight in the province.

Portion of a road in Silay City, 14 kms. north of Bacolod.

See also:
Sugarcane farms of Negros Island, March 23, 2012
Cadiz City, Negros Occidental, May 27, 2012
Canlaon, Negros Occidental, June 10, 2012
San Salvador, San Carlos, Negros Occidental, June 10, 2012
Elle Marie in Negros Occ., August 20, 2012
Ilongo ka gid Kon... July 18, 2012

Sugarcane Farms of Negros Island

I was born, grew up, studied up to high school, in Cadiz City, Negros Occidental. My parents and two siblings are still living there. Cadiz is on the northern most part of Negros Island, which is composed of two provinces, Negros Occidental, predominantly Ilongo speaking and the capital is Bacolod City, and Negros Oriental, Cebuano speaking and the capital is Dumaguete City.

My province is known for huge sugarcane plantations. As far as the eyes can see, one can see sugar plantation from the seaside to the foot -- sometimes up to 1/3 -- of mountains. Our house, like most houses in the province, is just beside a sugarcane farm. When we were young, if we needed to munch sugarcane, we just enter any part of a farm and get any type, any size, of a sugarcane. Or we would hunt spiders there. Life was cool.

Below is the new Silay-Bacolod airport. Silay is actually two cities away from Bacolod and the airport is built on a previously sugarcane farm. So when you land at, or take off from the airport, one will see wide sugarcane plots around it. Mt. Silay can also be seen from the airport terminal.

More photos of sugarcane farms below. At harvest time, when the soil is soft and muddy and the trucks cannot go in the middle of the farm, carabaos (water buffalo) would haul the sugarcane to a nearby road where the trucks are waiting.

Trucks that carry the sugarcane to a sugar milling company are usually large. While the most common trucks are still six-wheelers, many trucks now have 10 or 18 wheels. So one can imagine the heavy burden on public roads.

When the farms are prepared for another cycle of planting. Tractors are used to till the soil. Soil erosion is heavy in sugarcane farms because the soil is tilled yearly, and those tractors plow about 1 foot high of soil.

I'm not in the mood to inject numbers and statistics about the sugarcane economy, I just showed photos here. It's deja vu for me whenever I come home to visit my old and sickly parents. I like to sit in front of a car or a bus whenever I travel from Bacolod to Cadiz and back. The sight of those wide sugar plantations, something I cannot see anywhere in the Philippines, or in many other Asian cities or American cities that I have visited so far.