WAIMEA, Kauai — The main streets of Waimea and Hanapepe were filled yesterday with a cacophony of truck horns, shouts and waves for a half-hour in each town as Gay & Robinson cane haul trucks rumbled through for the last time.

The tractor-trailers were followed by dozens of G&R workers in pickup trucks decorated with stalks of sugar cane and signs thanking the west Kauai community for its support during the company's 120 years of sugar production.

Spectators held signs thanking the workers and the kamaäina company, which produced its last sugar yesterday. G&R closed its plantation and mill operations yesterday as it shifts its focus to agricultural land leasing and energy production.

The closure leaves Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. on Maui as the only sugar producer in the state.

The mahalos and waves back and forth yesterday between the parade spectators and the workers — most of whom will be laid off Nov. 25 — were upbeat and celebratory.

But at the mill in Kaumakani, where the trucks dumped their loads under the watch of hundreds of workers and their families, the mood was more subdued.

Photos were snapped, hugs and handshakes exchanged. But there were tears, too.

"It's a very momentous day, very tough," G&R President Alan Kennett said, taking off his hard hat and wiping his eyes.

The company will downsize from its present 167 employees to about 30.

"We're not going to have sugar around anymore. They're going to turn all the fields over the corn," said Darrell Ortiz, 53, after watching the parade go by in Waimea.

"That's another 100-plus people heading to the unemployment office," said Ortiz, who just got a job as a carpenter this week after 13 months out of work. "We all gotta feed our families."

Ortiz said he's concerned for the economic health of west Kauai as the G&R workers look for new jobs in a down economy. He said he's glad G&R has said its ex-workers can stay on in their affordable company homes.

"I know it's going to have some impact on everyone," Grace Kitabayashi, a third-generation co-owner of Ishihara Market in Waimea, said of G&R's transition, including layoffs of about 200 sugar workers in all this year. But she believes the seed corn companies will help take up some of the slack.

ON TO DOW

The Gay & Robinson Company is leasing 4,300 acres of former sugar lands to Dow AgroSciences' Mycogen division, and 180 acres to Pioneer to raise seed corn, Kennett said yesterday. "And we're in negotiations with others," he said.

Kennett's son Mark, G&R's field supervisor, is among those who has taken a job with Dow. But Dow hasn't indicated how many G&R workers it has hired or will hire.

Another potential employer is Pacific West Energy LLC, which has been working 10 years toward establishing an energy company, with a retooled Kaumakani sugar mill as its hub.

PacWest's plan is to lease land to grow sugar and woody biomass crops and from it produce 20 megawatts of electricity, 15 million gallons of ethanol and some sugar. Kauai Island Utility Co-operative has agreed to buy the generated power.

If PacWest can line up its $135 million financing, Kennett may consult for the company after he leaves G&R in January, he said. Meanwhile, others are heading their different ways.

LOYAL TO THE END

Janis Lopez, 42, brought her sons Kainoa, 5, and Kekoa, 9, to the mill yesterday to watch the last cane go in the mill.

Her husband, Tommy, 47, has worked for G&R for 29 years and stayed to the end out of loyalty to a company that was loyal to him, she said.

Janis Lopez works as a firefighter at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kekaha and Tommy Lopez is starting a small trucking company. She said staying on in G&R housing on Kaumakani Avenue — even with increased rent — will help them through the transition.

"My sons have heard these sounds all their lives," she said of the hissing steam coming from the mill boiler and the honking of truck horns as the drivers backed up. "I don't think it's really sunk in for them what's happening."