What Sugarcane Farming is to Me

Written at the request of Joey Gaston • August 2010 • Victorias City, Negros Occidental • Uploaded to Facebook on Aug 9, 2010, 5:22 AM

During the summer of 2010, I spent considerable time working on a sugarcane plantation known interchangeably by two names: Hacienda Gaston and Hacienda Rosalia. I learned an immense amount during my tenure on the ground, and I feel a distinct responsibility to map out my observations—to untangle the elements that define the structural reality, both good and bad, of sugarcane farming.

From one perspective, sugarcane cultivation looks like the open exploitation of the people who labor in the fields. The physical task of planting cane is long, arduous, and monotonous. The hours are staggering, the tropical heat is oppressive, and the constant exposure to insects and the elements severely limits how pleasant the labor can ever be. For all this intense physical toll, the workers are compensated very little. This is the baseline trap of unskilled labor: because anyone in acceptable physical condition can execute the task, the market dictates that wages do not need to be high.

Yet, the system's inefficiencies are occasionally leveraged by the workers themselves. The wage structure on this specific hacienda dictates that a set budget is paid out per field completed, rather than per hour logged. Consequently, the laborers are compensated strictly by their physical output, not their time. If a specific field task is light, they will deliberately stretch the timeline out accordingly, taking two or three days to finish a plot that could easily be cleared in a single afternoon. This setup also inadvertently strains their internal solidarity; because the budget for a field is fixed, if more workers show up to assist, individual payouts shrink. This structural friction is mitigated only by the deep communal and familial bonds on the estate—almost everyone in the fields is related, either twice or thrice removed.

The field hands live with virtually no security netting if they fall ill. There is no employer-sponsored health insurance or institutional medical system provided for them. While the government offers free public clinics within geographic reach, I witnessed numerous workers fall victim to severe poverty and a total lack of structural support. When a laborer requires urgent medical attention, the financial burden falls squarely upon the personal charity and patronage of the farm owner; otherwise, the individual risks losing their capacity to work entirely. In a system like this, a person who can no longer perform manual labor becomes a severe economic burden to their family until they either find a cure or pass away. Traditional folk remedies and natural cures are largely ignored on the farm; instead, when someone is in dire need of expensive prescription pharmaceuticals, they simply forgo treatment and blame it on their poverty.

Paradoxically, many of the laborers exhibit a total lack of fear regarding sickness or industrial injury. Tractor drivers operate heavy machinery entirely barefoot, on vehicles that frequently lack functional brakes. Welder hands in the machine shops rarely don protective coveralls or basic safety goggles. Out in the fields, storm protection entails running beneath a nearby tree or hacking off a massive banana leaf to use as a makeshift umbrella. Even after getting soaked through to the bone, the field crews return to their manual labor without a second thought. They show zero concern regarding malaria or other mosquito-borne illnesses, completely eschewing insect repellent.

Basic dental care is practically non-existent. If it is true that modern dentistry is among the single most vital components in extending human life expectancy, its impact has barely touched this community. I am unaware of their precise life expectancy metrics, but by the time a laborer reaches fifty, exposure to the elements, malnutrition, and a structurally unbalanced diet leave them looking decades older. When workers travel to town seeking dental intervention, they face incredibly bleak options at the state-run clinics. If a tooth shows signs of decay or a cavity is uncovered, the universal protocol is simple: the tooth is pulled. There is zero preventative preservation or follow-up care. Once a tooth is extracted, these individuals are never offered options for dentures, dental bridges, or structural alternatives. Many are missing upwards of ten teeth, leading to immense difficulty chewing solid foods, which accelerates severe weight loss and malnutrition.

During my time in the fields, I worked alongside a man named Herman who possessed only five teeth. He was visibly malnourished and suffered from what appeared to be slight developmental delays accompanied by a severe, permanent case of the shakes. No one in his immediate circle seemed to notice how desperately he required dental intervention, so I took it upon myself to personally purchase dentures for him out of pocket, despite the steep financial cost. The moment the word spread, ten other laborers approached me begging for teeth, forcing me to explain that the high price tag prevented me from funding dental work for the entire community.

A cyclical trap of economic limitations effectively prevents these families from ever becoming anything other than generations of agricultural laborers. Birth control is rarely practiced, and it is entirely common for a farming family to have four or more children. While parents are out managing the fields, the children are largely free to roam the hacienda, frequently missing out on basic education simply because their parents do not actively enforce attendance—even though public schooling is entirely free. When pressed on why their children aren't in classrooms, parents universally cite a lack of money. Because field wages are so low, purchasing the mandatory auxiliary school supplies—uniforms, textbooks, textbooks, notebooks, and pencils—is an impossible hurdle. Often, the simple inability to afford a school uniform keeps a child illiterate at home. The parents, having received little to no formal schooling themselves, cannot imagine alternative careers because they have never been trained in any other trade. Technical trade schools remain locked behind a financial paywall.

To keep their households afloat, many residents supplement their income by selling readily available raw commodities harvested around the estate: wild fruits, ornamental plants, raw hardwoods, and fresh fish. Balances between field shifts, domestic duties, and secondary hustles are difficult to maintain. Consequently, workers frequently sacrifice their productivity in the sugarcane fields to secure more hours at home collecting goods to sell independently.

From a management perspective, the workforce can appear heavily spoiled. Because the hacienda owner historically functioned as a paternalistic patron and protector, the laborers carry no underlying fear of losing their jobs or livelihood. They are supervised directly by their own kin, who rarely scold or admonish lazy behavior because they are dealing with their own flesh and blood. The supervisors themselves have grown up with an absolute sense of structural security—the assumption that these specific fields will always be theirs to manage, and that the traditional hierarchy face no real threat. This extreme familiarity presents massive operational bottlenecks for the farm owner as he strives to modernize productivity, implement mechanization, or dismiss ineffective laborers. There simply is no alternative safety net for what these workers would do if they were cut loose from the estate.

High levels of underemployment persist across the hacienda, yet the jobless survive because the traditional Filipino family structure enforces incredibly tight safety nets where successful members routinely subsidize their unemployed relatives. Furthermore, the land itself is forgiving; the hacienda is surrounded by wild fruit trees, and the local waterways yield edible frogs and fish. Even in deep structural poverty, absolute starvation is held at bay by the natural landscape.

In many ways, these people are genuinely happy. They sleep easy, and they rest even easier. Their intense manual labor provides excellent cardiovascular exercise, and possessing the absolute certainty that their jobs will be waiting for them tomorrow regardless of their daily performance, their singular anxiety boils down to whether it will rain or not. Conversely, because the farm owner is the one injecting the actual operational capital, the existential terror of weather patterns falls squarely upon his shoulders. The laborers are compensated regardless of crop yield, provided they complete their basic daily tasks.

The community is tightly knit; the workers know each other by name, family history, personal reputation, and every seemingly inconsequential detail. They make it their business to familiarize themselves with everyone on the payroll, and navigating around each other's vices and virtues is completely normal. Privacy is non-existent, but the resulting communal bond ensures they feel entirely at home wherever they step on the property. While households can rarely afford to invite neighbors over for formal meals, they find an immense sense of psychological security in each other's presence. In the fields, they will generously share whatever scarce viands they possess—with the strict exception of their personal rice, which is rarely traded. Because their diets consist almost entirely of rice, any rare addition like fresh fish, crab, or wild meat is celebrated and shared among the crew.

Their daily pleasures are few, simple, and cheap: drinking sugary sodas, eating sweet breads, smoking cigarettes, and occasionally sharing a bottle of local rum. These highly accessible items make it easy to take a brief field break and bond with coworkers. Smoking operates on a communal barter system; workers constantly bum cigarettes off one another, creating an unwritten obligation to offer up their own pack when they have one. The pure, simple happiness they exhibit when sitting down to drink an ice-cold Coca-Cola or smoke a cigarette brings an immediate, genuine smile to their faces. Virtually none of them harbor aspirations of owning modern tech gadgets, luxury vehicles, or sprawling estates. Because they pay zero rent to live on the hacienda property, they construct basic, functional shacks out of bamboo or corrugated steel, occupying them for their entire lives.

This lack of domestic privacy is absolute. The workers live in dense clusters of shacks constructed without solid, insulated walls; every single ambient sound, conversation, or sneeze is instantly audible to the neighbors. There are no private showers or interior bathrooms. Bathing is conducted fully clothed out in the open, utilizing manual hand pumps to draw water from common wells in plain view of the community. Wherever you go, there are always individuals standing around observing the traffic. This ubiquitous activity—locally referred to as *istanding by*—defines the lanes, generating a high-velocity gossip network that transmits news across the settlements in minutes. This extreme visibility cuts both ways: because everyone knows what everyone else is doing, instances of crime, theft, or domestic abuse are instantly exposed. On the flip side, intimacy between couples is severely restricted; there are no short-stay motels hiding in the fields, and places of absolute secrecy are few and far between. Coupled with a total absence of sex education, these brief encounters frequently result in unwanted pregnancies.

There is a deep emotional alienation between the plantation administration and the field force. While the laborers view one another as extended family, their relationship with the farm owner follows a completely separate narrative. When speaking privately, the workers rarely have a positive word to say about management. This stems from a deep-seated perception of the owner as a cold, numbers-driven entity willing to sacrifice their comfort to drive up industrial productivity. They speak of the administration as an entity so far removed from their reality that they barely acknowledge its humanity, viewing the owner as an oppressive force designed to extract their labor and restrict their autonomy rather than protect them.

Concurrently, there is zero romantic love for the sugarcane crop itself. The laborers could not care less whether the seasonal yield is high or low; to them, it is merely a redundant chore. When shipments of fertilizer and manure arrive, the farmers deploy them half-heartedly and inconsistently. On multiple occasions, fertilizer trucks would arrive at the sectors hours after the initial planting rows had already been closed, resulting in erratic zones where the soil was over-saturated with chemicals alongside entire stretches that received no nutrients at all. Having completely decoupled the growth of the cane from their own personal identities, the crop simply becomes a mundane background cycle: the cane is planted, the cane grows, and the cane is cut. I am convinced that if management implemented an incentive system—such as direct financial bonuses tied to surplus tonnage or sugar content—this detached attitude could eventually be reformed.

The tropical weather can be utterly brutal. On peak summer days, the thermometer routinely clears 30°C with overwhelming humidity, making heavy labor exhausting for everyone. Yet the crews press on through their assignments. What consistently baffled me, however, was their insistence on pausing for numerous unscheduled breaks regardless of whether the weather was favorable or poor. The operational hours are highly erratic, serving as a point of constant friction for me. Nominally, the workday begins at 6:00 AM, and there is a theoretical call for a 5:30 AM briefing to discuss major logistics, though I never once saw that meeting actually materialize. While time is officially called at 6:00 AM, actual labor rarely commences before 6:30 or 7:00 AM. The workers begin walking from their respective settlements at 6:00 AM, modulating their pace along the paths to ensure the entire line arrives to start together. If an efficient crew turns up at 6:20 AM, they will sit on their tools in a display of solidarity, waiting for the slowest walkers to arrive at 7:00 AM.

The moment tools are raised, complaints surface about hunger or fatigue, prompting an immediate breakfast and cigarette break at 7:30 AM. By the time the early risers finish eating, the latecomers are just beginning their breakfast, meaning the workers who are done spend their time hovering around, bumming food or extra cigarettes, driving productivity further down. After a succession of these casual breaks, work resumes in fits and starts until noon. Occasionally, as a retributive compromise, crews are let off early at 12:00 PM, though this was rare. We would return to the hot sectors at 1:00 PM, but labor wouldn't actually resume until 1:30 or 2:00 PM depending on the distance of the plot and how slowly the line walked. From that point on, the afternoon wrap-up time became a total game of Russian Roulette. On numerous occasions, the supervisors would call time around 3:00 PM or even earlier—just as I was finally getting warmed up to log serious hours.

The composition of the workforce is equally fluid and confusing. The estate populates a vast number of roles, both direct and auxiliary: planting crews, weeding teams, tractor drivers, heavy mechanics, water buffalo handlers, and fertilizer processing hands. Out in the fields, the schedule was highly erratic; our core group of roughly twenty-five regular field hands would suddenly swell to thirty-five without warning. Complete strangers would materialize on the grid, pick up a tool, and blend into the workflow without anyone batting an eye. Most disturbingly, we were frequently joined in the furrows by the underage children of the field hands, wielding heavy iron hoes and sharp machetes alongside the adults. I am certain none of these kids were older than fifteen. When I investigated, I discovered some were simply skipping school due to laziness, some had been granted a casual day off by their parents, and the worst cases had dropped out of the academic track entirely years ago, drifting between odd jobs to scrape together pocket change. Because each field is budgeted as a single lump sum, the presence of these extra hands directly penalized the regular workers by shrinking their individual take-home pay. While extra muscle was occasionally a welcome surprise on massive two-hectare plots, it was frequently comical to watch fifteen people clumsily trying to tackle a tiny thirty-meter stretch that could have been effortlessly cleared by a single focused laborer.

Their long-term future remains highly precarious. The stark reality is that their economic survival is directly tethered to the health of the business; they possess zero immunity against global market fluctuations, sugar price collapses, severe droughts, or any other systemic shock that could shutter the hacienda. If the farm were to liquidate, the community would be completely stranded. Due to decades of generational isolation and a total lack of alternative education, they know how to wield a machete and a hoe, but very little else. While they excel at basic household and agricultural labor, the number of individuals capable of venturing outside the boundary lines to secure employment that requires skills beyond raw muscle mass is dangerously small.

Religious devotion forms an indispensable pillar of their lives. Recognizing that their singular outlet and ultimate hope rests entirely on the mercy and attention of God, they are fierce regulars at the local plantation chapel—a structure that is truly beautiful by any aesthetic metric. Erected in the 1960s out of discarded wooden cartwheels, it features traditional Filipino motifs and open, wall-less sides. Every Sunday the community gathers for Mass; they pray meticulously before every meal and can recite scripture verses from memory. Sadly, they can recite far more lines from their favorite pop songs or commercial films.

A severe linguistic barrier isolates them further from the country. The entire workforce speaks Hiligaynon (Ilonggo), a regional dialect exclusive to the Western Visayas. Because it is structurally distinct from Tagalog, the national language, the laborers struggle to comprehend outsiders unless communication is stripped down to basic, everyday terms. Monolingual isolation severely limits their ability to migrate off the home island of Negros to scout for metropolitan careers. In an era where millions of Filipinos regularly go abroad as overseas contract workers, these laborers are effectively pinned to the soil by their language.

They possess no concept of environmental conservation or ecological coexistence. Commercial waste is discarded willy-nilly across the landscape. While trash is traditionally burned in open backyard piles, they do systematically salvage scrap metal and plastics to sell to local recyclers as a secondary income streamline. Anything else consumed away from the household is simply dropped where it is emptied, leaving plastic bags and processed food wrappers floating permanently across the rows. Furthermore, despite the local beach sitting a mere ten minutes from the sectors, the shoreline is heavily littered with an accumulation of organic and inorganic trash, discarded without a care for marine pollution or the hygiene of their own living quarters. This ambient refuse eventually migrates back into the common spaces, where it is routinely consumed by packs of severely emaciated, malnourished dogs that roam the lanes. The natural rivers cutting through the hacienda are badly contaminated with human waste and heavy chemical fertilizer runoff from the fields. Consequently, the population is forced to draw its drinking supply from deep wells tapped far away from these compromised surface waters.

Conversely, the air quality remains exceptionally pristine. With no major industrial or urban hubs choking the horizon, and fresh maritime breezes caressing the topography daily, the atmosphere surrounding the hacienda is pure and healthy. Furthermore, the core group of workers demonstrates an undeniable work ethic, turning up every single morning regardless of how late the schedule slips or how heavily the tropical rain falls. If they don't show up, they don't get paid—so they turn up, and amazingly, the majority arrive on the line with a massive smile on their faces.

It is critical to note that they are not trapped in a one-dimensional system of corporate exploitation; the administration actively provides humane treatment and real channels to master new crafts. The estate operates a specialized design workshop called *Hacienda Crafts*, where residents are encouraged to train and collaborate on commercial artisan projects. The workshop provides fair, above-average wages for manual craftsmanship, equipping families with the economic means to survive comfortably well above the starvation line. The administration also grants free housing anywhere the workers choose to construct a roof on the property, though they naturally cluster into a few established hamlets.

Beyond employment and housing, the plantation sponsors dedicated academic scholarships for the children of the field hands, funding their room, board, and full university tuitions in the nearby capital of Bacolod City. Periodically, management hosts specialized arts-and-crafts workshops right on the farm, hoping to foster entrepreneurial design skills that can transform agricultural laborers into independent artisans. The estate also hosts mobile medical missions, delivering free clinical checkups, pediatric vaccinations, and preventative healthcare directly to the communities. The infrastructure is explicitly there to allow the youth to become something other than field hands. Unfortunately, very few choose to capitalize on these avenues. I was told directly by Mr. Gaston that after these intensive design workshops wrap up, the participants frequently approach him asking what exactly they are supposed to do with the creative skills they just acquired.

Conclusions

Mr. Gaston once quoted a local clergyman, observing that the fundamental bottleneck confronting his workforce is a profound "poverty of the imagination." Throughout his twenty-four years managing the family estate, he has strived to engineer a modern, highly productive agricultural model where human labor, industrial mechanization, and the soil operate in perfect harmony—but it has proven an incredibly uphill battle. He maintains a stubbornly optimistic outlook on the future, fully believing that the Philippine sugar industry is poised for a major commercial comeback. He genuinely wants to uplift his workforce, but he confesses to growing deeply exhausted by laborers who refuse to take the operations seriously, treating the enterprise with an excess of casual ease.

I, too, found myself completely exasperated on numerous afternoons when I turned up expecting a full shift of heavy field labor, only to watch the entire crew pack up their tools and head home after a couple of casual hours, abandoning a half-planted row that could have been effortlessly completed before sunset. If my evaluation of sugarcane farming appears overly harsh, one can attribute it directly to my personal biases—I became deeply familiar and friendly with the field hands themselves. Yet, I was simultaneously welcomed into Mr. Gaston’s home as a true member of his own family. I am profoundly grateful for the rare access that was granted to me over the course of that tropical summer, and I highly recommend that more students undertake such an immersive expedition.

Ultimately, I witnessed the reality of that "poverty of the imagination," but I must defend the laborers by pointing out that their cognitive world has never extended beyond the specific hectares they inhabit, the baseline livelihood they are handed at birth, and the fields of green sugar that enclose their every movement. The output generated by the specialized weavers inside *Hacienda Crafts* is deeply beautiful, requiring long hours of dedication and precise skill. However, the artisan roster remains small; because they operate strictly on an order-by-order basis, securing consistent, predictable income for the entire community remains a challenge.

I do not claim to possess the definitive blueprint for managing an agricultural enterprise in a developing nation. It was difficult for me to emotionally reconcile the raw hardships the field hands endure simply because they happened to be born onto the soil of the hacienda. They live remarkably cheerful lives, and I envy the absolute simplicity with which their daily reality is navigated; yet, there were many hot weeks where I grew entirely tired of the labor and deeply bored by the slow, redundant pace of life. I walked away knowing that on a plantation like this, the human equation can never be ignored or over-simplified. It is lazy to casually write these people off as unmotivated or laid-back. If any of us attempted to execute the exact manual labor they perform for over thirty years—enduring it across consecutive generations under the tropical sun—we would quickly realize that a structural change would do all of us an immense amount of good.