Houma area buzzing with activity

Houma seems to be on national news a lot these days, in part, because it is a major oil town close to the gulf oil spill but perhaps just far enough away to not be considered highly vulnerable, as are some other critical locations that are closer to the coast and the spill.  It is the logical location for what has now become the BP's Louisiana Command Center (formerly, BP training center), one of the key centers where Admiral Thad Allen is updated, and is seen issuing some of his press releases.  The command center is located at the crossroads of Hwy 30 and Hwy 311, just north of Houma...and only ten minutes from where we live.  There is major building activity going on behind Houma's major mall strip that would make one think that Houma is currently in a rapid expansion mode.  There is a tremendous amount of buzz and activity in Houma, right now.  Mixed with this activity is a strong sense of uncertainty and concern with hurricane season now bearing down on us.

A brand new $22M Marriott Courtyard is being built right across from where I work, and is well ahead of schedule...to be opened later this fall (see picture).  When we walk out of our office building, and look in the direction of our sugarcane plants that are on the crossing carts, the Marriott Courtyard now seemingly looms over our plants, and catches our attention.   Right now, our plants are being rolled into dark houses each evening to create a "tropical" daylength that stimulates them to go into a flowering mode.  They are on schedule to flower beginning in late September.  Without a photoperiod treatment, they wouldn't flower until December, and then only sporadically, if at all, and our seed production would be far below what it is with the photoperiod treatment. We just recently built a new photoperiod / crossing house complex, and none to soon.  This year, the on-site facility is a backup, as we "break in" our new facility at our farm nine miles away.  With all the building going on around us at our main Station, incident light will make it increasingly difficult to create the photoperiod effect needed to get our plants to flower when we want them to.