A native to southern Asia, sugar cane has been nourishing man since prehistoric times. It is not known for certain what culture developed the technique of converting sugar cane juice into crystalline sugar, but as the earliest known written reference to the process appears in Sanskrit in about 500 B.C., historians

Sugar cane was cut by hand in the fields and conveyed to sugar mills by various means. In some cases, wooden channels were used to “shoot” the sugar cane downhill from fields in the upland areas of a plantation, and in others, a “windlass” was used to hoist sugar cane