“We call it black snow because it falls from the sky just like snowflakes. But it’s just the burnt trash blowing from the cane. I know people who’ve had to move out of the Glades because their respiratory issues got so bad during the burn season.”

To hear the $13bn sugar industry tell it, there is no problem here. The Clewiston-based US Sugar Corporation, which farms more than 230,000 acres across four counties and employs about 2,500 people, touts its own studies regularly claiming “the Glades communities have air that is good, safe and clean”, and insisting those who say otherwise are “dishonest anti-farming activists”.

Yet the evidence against is more than just anecdotal. A 2021 collaboration between ProPublica and the Palm Beach Post determined, among numerous other findings, that hospital admissions for respiratory distress in Belle Glade, a town in the heart of sugar country, increased up to 35% in the harvesting season.

Researchers at Florida International University found in 2015 that levels of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) present in the air at Belle Glade were 15 times higher during harvesting season than the summer growing season.