POLICY WONKERY: WHERE U.S. SUGAR MEETS FOOTBALL

by Orson on Jun 24, 2008 1:21 PM EDT

Public policy rarely affects demon football, but occasionally an event happens that is so large if blunders its way into everything in your life whether you like it or not: a natural disaster, disease, the release of Grand Theft Auto: 4...it happens from time to time, and it just happened to Florida high school and college football thanks to the biggest environmental buyout in the state's history.

POOF! 1.7B later, and gone.

The state of Florida will give U.S. Sugar $1.75 billion dollars for its holdings in the Everglades, a swath of land totalling 187,000 acres in size. The purchase constitutes an immense step forward in the state's plan to reestablish the Everglades to at least a zombified version of its former self, offsetting one hundred years of haphazard development and Keystone Kops engineering by the Army Corps of Engineers.

(Who really can't be blamed: everything they were told to do turned out to be impossible, counterintuitively destructive, or just plain harebrained, like accidentally salinating the freshwater table in South Florida with drilling. Florida's like Harry Potter's hair; no matter how it's cut, it just tends to take the same wooly, unmanageable shape no matter what you do.)

Football enters the equation in this fashion: U.S. Sugar is headquartered in Clewiston, and with the buyout the company may cease to exist at all--taking with it the main source of income for not only Clewiston, but for Belle Glade and Pahokee, the legendary "rabbit-chasing" football talent wells producing Fred Taylor, Reidel Anthony, Anquan Boldin, and many, many others, the buyout means their towns have been given a terminal diagnosis. The fields will be converted to reservoirs, and the main source of these towns wealth will go back to being what it was before: namely, the drainpipe for the entire southern half of the state.

What will remain after the cane leaves?

"A few churches, some sod farms, and a little cattle," according to a friend of ours familiar with the area. "These places look like they're out of Oh Brother Where Art Thou already." These towns, for all intents and purposes, will cease to appear on the roster in two decades, ending an era of Florida college football and drastically shifting the recruiting map in state.

Appreciate, if you will, not the ample opportunities for political points-scoring going on here, but the curious consequences of what just happened: an act of public policy impacting regional football life. The rabbits won't have anywhere to run, the cane will be pulled up in favor of grass, and the Muck City mythos will be covered up in the confluence of environmental policy and globalization.

Naturally, being a blogger, we blame the curse of ESPN for all of this.

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Comments

Plenty of guys from Iowa’s 2002 season were from that same area—that’s where I’d first heard about the rabbit chasers. Football will indeed never be the same.

by Oops Pow Surprise on Jun 24, 2008 1:31 PM EDT reply actions

Wow. Not sure how to react to this. RIP Muck City

by NOLAcane on Jun 24, 2008 1:31 PM EDT reply actions

Insightful prediction. And what really sucks is Florida always recruited well there. The list goes on – Louis Oliver, Deonte Thompson…

by RIck on Jun 24, 2008 1:35 PM EDT reply actions

Pretty good read here.

by Allahver Fist on Jun 24, 2008 1:39 PM EDT reply actions

You know, the federal government could use some of the corn subsidy money to pay US Sugar to keep planting sugar cane, but sell it for ethanol production instead of refining to sugar. Sugar cane is far better for ethanol production than corn (just ask Brazil) but it just doesn’t grow well outside of south Florida. But that would make sense, and we can’t have that, can we?

Alternate option: Annex Cuba. Sugar cane grows fucking everywhere there.

by Chris on Jun 24, 2008 1:39 PM EDT reply actions

Yeah, and possum chasing just doesn’t really suffice as a substitute. That’s why Tennessee focuses its recruiting out of state.

by MaconDawg on Jun 24, 2008 1:40 PM EDT reply actions

*Oh Hermano Where Art Thou

by Bobby Decatur on Jun 24, 2008 1:46 PM EDT reply actions

Cane far better than corn? No, not by a mile. Better yes, but billions of other issues. Brazil heavily subsides their own sugar cane production, so it is not like sugar cane is today’s Texas tea sweetener. Also, corn grows everywhere, like the entire middle part of the country, and it can handle something called “winter”, sugar only grows in swamps in LA and Fla. Lastly, the US gov’t has historically been crazy protectionist of sugar, at the expense of other american industries. So US sugar, be gone with ye.

by meatybob on Jun 24, 2008 1:48 PM EDT reply actions

Is Captain Peter Peachfuzz still running the Corps of Engineers?

by yoyofutbawl on Jun 24, 2008 1:51 PM EDT reply actions

Wait until you see how the State of South Carolina’s crackdown on dog-fighting will impact Clemson’s recruiting.

by Out of Conference on Jun 24, 2008 1:58 PM EDT reply actions

So this explains why Florida continues to be one of the top states to produce extraordinarily talented players each year. I believe California and Texas are the other two top producers. How do they do it every year? Facilities? Training programs? Bigger supply of growth hormones and steroids?

by blon57 on Jun 24, 2008 2:27 PM EDT reply actions

Hey now, we have the steroids and growth hormones market cornered up here in Ohio (see Katzenmoyer, Andy

by poguemahone on Jun 24, 2008 2:43 PM EDT reply actions

I thought dog & cockfights were why Stephen Garcia chose USCe.

by yoyofutbawl on Jun 24, 2008 4:12 PM EDT reply actions

- Well, dogfighting we did last year. I wonder if the statute of limitations for beating three different groups of Bulldogs last year has run out.

by Out of Conference on Jun 24, 2008 5:02 PM EDT reply actions

Orson — I smell a lengthy Sporting Blog piece, or hell, a lengthy EDSBS piece. Go all “Brian” or “SMQ” on this MFer. It would be interesting to see what the college participation rates for these kids would be otherwise, amongst other factors.

by Whohah on Jun 24, 2008 6:28 PM EDT reply actions

@5:
They’re buying the land back to keep sugar from being grown on it because growing sugar there is destroying the Everglades. So keeping on growing sugar, but instead making it ethanol instead of using corn is still a stupid idea.

Now, if you want to advocate using the newly freed land to let switchgrass grow wild, and occasionally harvest THAT to produce celulosic Ethanol, well that wouldn’t have all the nasty fertilizers and constant development which the sugar would have, would yield as much ethanol as the corn would, would require less energy input, and still achieve the goal of helping the everglades return to a more natural state.

But hey, what do I know? I’m just some random dumbass on the interwebs.

by Not You on Jun 25, 2008 12:29 AM EDT reply actions