Over the Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and I baked the season's first batch of Christmas cookies with our two-year-old son.

Like most small children, he tried to pour the whole bag of sugar into the mix. Like most good parents, we said, "No," and cleaned up the mess he made.

That same weekend, Pete Dufresne and his son were also wrestling with sugar, but their battle was a little more daunting. They were busy pulling tractors out of fields almost too muddy to harvest.

The Dufresne farm is humming like most in southern Louisiana this time of year. It's cane harvest season, and the harvesters, tractors, and big-rig trucks will be working overtime until after Christmas to make sure we can bake those holiday treats.

This is a grind.

Unfortunately for Dufresne and the other 550 cane farmers in Louisiana, Mother Nature hasn't exactly cooperated this year.

"This is a grind," he said of this year's harvest. 'We've got a good crop and prices are decent, but we're having a hell of a time getting it out. You could literally go swimming on the back end of this field."

I must admit, I didn't even venture into the front end of the field because it was so muddy. At the driest point, the muck was still knee deep, and softies from the city like me are afraid of the repercussions of handing our wives muddy pants for the laundry after a business trip.

Dirty jeans are the least of Dufresne's concerns. It rained nearly every day in October, and clear blue skies have been a rarity since.

"Every load of sugar cane we take to the mill has mud and rain water mixed in," he said. Those heavier loads also mean more trips to the mill and more trips to the gas station.

Speaking of fuel, Dufresne said he will use about twice as much diesel in his $325,000 harvester this year because wet conditions force it to move at a slower pace.

Factor in additional labor, the expense of yanking stuck equipment out of the muck, and the extra maintenance required on machinery, and Dufresne said this will be one of his most expensive harvests ever.

We don't make sugar. We make food.

When the cane is finally extracted from the field, it is delivered to one of eleven sugar mills in the state, like the one in Raceland, Louisiana run by Neville Dolan.

Neville took us on a behind-the-scenes tour of his mill—one of the largest in the country—to show us how giant grinders squeeze sugar juice out of the stalk so it can be heated and crystallized into raw sugar—kinda' like the "Sugar in the Raw" packets you find on the table at restaurants.

The rain has forced the mills to operate a bit slower and even caused one to temporarily shut down. As Neville admits, the "trash" that's being carried from the field is giving everyone a headache.

But the mill can't run too slow. Once the cane is cut, it has to be turned into raw sugar within roughly 24 hours or the sugar starts to go bad.

When at the mill, you can't help but notice the soggy mountains in the background. "Bag ass," Neville explained, pointing to mountain range.

He wasn't talking about my posterior. Bagasse is the proper name for the fibrous material that remains once sweet juice is squeezed out of the cane stalk. The Cajuns have simply applied their own unique pronunciation.

There's a lot of bagasse in south Louisiana—a whole lot of bagasse—and Neville said the range gets a little bigger after each harvest season. That's why there is a race to find something to do with the bagasse.

Right now, it's burned to help generate electricity for the mill, but even that hasn't made a dent, so Raceland is running a test project to condense the bagasse into charcoal like bricks for sale to electric generators statewide.

The only other Louisiana peaks we came across were the raw sugar mounds feeding the Domino Sugar refinery outside of New Orleans—that's where Raceland and a few other mills in Louisiana, Texas, and Florida send their raw sugar to be turned into the pure, white stuff we sprinkle onto cookies.

Pete Maraia, the plant manager at Domino, showed us everything from cranes offloading raw sugar barges to the robotic arms that package the finished product and prepare it for shipment to grocery stores from coast to coast.

Of course, much of what Pete said went in one ear and out the other because I was too busy thinking about how one of the most efficient refineries in the world literally rose from the ashes after Hurricane Katrina.

"A lot of people questioned whether we'd ever be able to produce mass quantities of sugar here again," Pete said of the hurricane aftermath. "But we've come back bigger and stronger."

He explained that failure was never an option because too many people depend on Domino—the local community needs the jobs, farmers need the refinery, and America needs the sugar.

"We don't make sugar," he concluded. "We make food."

That will give me a lot to think about the next time my family makes cookies together.

Then again, the biggest head scratcher of all might be that, despite all the struggle and work that goes into making sugar, it's still so cheap I barely blink when my son dumps half a bag on the counter by mistake.

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