KAUMAKANI, Kaua'i — Barring rain delay, the last field of Gay & Robinson sugar cane will be harvested today and fed into its mill here.

The last cane-haul truck will take a circuitous route through Hanapepe and Waimea, trailed by Gay & Robinson employees in trucks decorated with signs thanking the people and businesses of west Kaua'i for their support through 120 years in the sugar business.

"That's when all the employees will be standing there by the mill, crying our eyes out," said administrative aide Susan Somers, one of a few dozen workers who will continue with G&R after this year.

"It is coming to the end of an era for the Robinsons growing sugar cane," company president Alan Kennett said to more than 600 Gay & Robinson employees, retirees and their families gathered under tents Saturday to celebrate the kama'aina company's sugar days.

Once one of the state's smaller sugar producers without a mill of its own, Gay & Robinson outlasted all but one of its Hawai'i competitors. At its peak, the company employed several hundred workers. This fall's final harvest totaled 49,500 tons of raw sugar, from 5,221 acres.

Before the Pacific Missile Range Facility, G&R was the dominant employer on Kaua'i's west side. This year as the company gears down its sugar operations, about 200 employees will have been laid off. It's not clear yet how many of that number will be seeking new jobs, since some are of retirement age. But the company has pledged to allow former workers to stay on at modest rent in 320 low-cost plantation houses.

In 1968, before Hawai'i's sugar began losing ground to cheaper foreign and U.S. Mainland cane, the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association counted 26 functioning mills in the Islands and production of more than 1 million tons a year of raw sugar.

When G&R completes its last harvest today and shutters its mill later this year, Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar on Maui will be the state's last sugar plantation and mill.

"To me it was bound to happen," said Pat Baniaga, who retired in January after more than 40 years with Olokele and G&R plantations. "You could see the last five to 10 years, the price of sugar stayed the same, but costs to produce it went up and up."

The reason for Gay & Robinson's longevity, people said Saturday, are its land and its people.

"Those are the people that kept Gay & Robinson going," G&R Chairman Warren Robinson said of the workers around him Saturday, munching kalua pig, chicken hekka, poi, rice and malassadas (dusted with C&H sugar, the label under which G&R sugar is sold).

Employees combined their hard work with an ideal sugar-growing soil and good water supply to produce world-record productivity per acre, Robinson said. But their hard work couldn't overcome a global economy stacked against them, he said.

Wearing a plantation-style palaka shirt and straw hat, U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai'i, called the sun-darkened, calloused workers "the salt of the Earth. You make Kaua'i and Hawai'i what it is."

In the past 15 years, G&R's attempts to stay afloat included buying and upgrading former competitor Olokele Sugars' mill, expanding its sugar-growing with former Kekaha Sugar acreage, and studying a variety of alternative energy options. It also considered and rejected value-added options such as producing its own retail sugar, making a fiberboard from bagasse, and even growing a sugar substitute, stevia.

After sugar, G&R will continue operating its large cattle ranch, leasing significant amounts of land to seed corn companies, and will produce more hydropower to sell to the Kaua'i Island Utility Cooperative.

It also has on the back-burner possible plans for a low-density resort on Kaua'i's west shore and hasn't ruled out solar or biodiesel projects, Robinson said.

But in recent days, all the focus has been on the final chapter of the sugar operation.

"I think the Robinson family always tried to take care of their employees," Robinson said. Going forward, it intends to keep rents low for former employees who'll be allowed to stay in camp houses, despite costly federal requirements to upgrade sewage treatment, he said.

FACING FUTURE

Dow Agrosciences and Pioneer Hi-Bred are seed corn companies that are leasing land from G&R and helping keep it afloat. Neither of these G&R tenants nor two other seed corn companies operating on Kaua'i responded to requests for information about how many current or former G&R employees they have hired or intend to hire. Kennett said he knows some have been hired, but was not sure how many.

If Pacific West Energy LLC is able to pull together its $135 million plan to grow sugar again on Kaua'i to produce both sugar ethanol and electricity (from burning sugar bagasse and woody biomass crops), the fields on Kaua'i's dry west side may again ripple with the green of growing cane.

PacWest's goal is to produce 20 megawatts of electricity for KIUC by burning sugar bagasse and other woody biomass — plus making up to 15 million gallons a year of sugar ethanol for mixing with the state's gasoline supply.

PacWest even hopes to process and retail its own gourmet sugars and supply it wholesale to Kaua'i businesses such as the new rum distillery, said PacWest President William Maloney.

The company is working on a power purchase agreement with the utility. But it still has to lease enough land — at least 10,000 acres — and get investor backing for its plan.

In its favor, Kennett noted, are federal and state assistance programs for alternative fuels. But there are still a lot of elements that need to come into place.

"Maloney is really trying to put this deal together," Kennett said. "If he is successful, I read in the newspaper that he'll need 320 employees" — at least 100 more than G&R is letting go.

Gay & Robinson sugar mill worker Rumolo Manzano, 52, hopes to get a job with a seed corn company when his sugar mill job ends Nov. 25.

"I really feel sad. I was hoping to retire with this company," he said on Wednesday. Manzano has worked for G&R 15 years. "We're getting older and suddenly it closes down. I hope we can find a good job again."

Centrifuge operator Mario Lagoc has been with G&R and Olokele for 32 years at the Kaumakani mill. Like many others, he's hoping that Dow's seed corn operation will have a place for him when the mill clean-up and moth-balling process is complete.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Charles "Red" Carveiro's grandfather moved to Kaua'i from Portugal to work in the sugar fields. Carveiro's father logged 1 million miles driving cane haul trucks on Kaua'i. And from his own first job hukilepo (hoeing) in 1961 to his retirement as an irrigation supervisor in 2002, Carveiro worked for Olokele and G&R plantations.

Then something happened that Carveiro said is more common than not for the fourth generation: His children didn't go into sugar.

"I told them, get an education. I didn't want them working hard like me," Carveiro said. "This is hard work."

One son died young, but his other son became a credit union vice president and his only daughter works for the county water department, Carveiro said.

Many others in recent generations of Japanese, European, Puerto Rican and Filipino immigrants tell the same story.

"That's been a goal of our family, to work for a better life," said Pat Pablo, a state public health nurse whose family worked in sugar. "But never forget your roots and the values to work hard and respect your neighbors."

Wayne James Rapozo, now an attorney living and working in London, has fond memories of growing up with his grandparents George and Augusta Rapozo at G&R's Pakala camp.

"I understand and truly appreciate the dedication, hard work, discipline and other intangible values that come with kama'aina stewardship — of the land itself and also of the communities that have tended the land," event emcee Bill Dollar read from Rapozo's letter at the company picnic, before every G&R worker and retiree present was given a commemorative T-shirt he provided.

"When the cane trucks do their last cane haul," Rapozo wrote, "it should be clearly understood that this is a victory lap and that I and many others on Kaua'i and throughout Hawai'i ride with the drivers and the rest of Gay & Robinson team."