Farmers Blame Mexico for the Closure of a Sugar Mill. But Is the Crop Right for Drought-Ridden Texas?

Historians believe that Spanish missionaries built the first sugar mill in Texas in the 1780s at Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, in present-day San Antonio. Four decades later, Stephen F. Austin’s colonists planted cane in southeast Texas, and over the course of the nineteenth century, sugar grew into one of the state’s most lucrative exports. The sprawling cane plantations along the Brazos River—worked by thousands of slaves toiling in pestilential conditions—became known as the Sugar Bowl of Texas. After mosaic disease decimated the state’s sugar crop in the 1920s, cane production was largely abandoned for nearly half a century. But the 1962 U.S. economic embargo against Cuba, which restricted sugar imports, helped resurrect the industry. In 1970, a cooperative of one hundred South…

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