On U.S. Sugar's land in Clewiston, you'll find fields and fields of sugarcane.
You'll find farmers like Jarad Plair working in those fields, harvesting to help feed families across America.
"It's just a feeling you get when you know that you're growing a crop that feeds other families," Plair said. "I love what I do, and I wouldn't change it for the world."
The process starts by burning fields of sugarcane. Then, it's loaded onto a train, and gets sent to their mill as raw sugar. Eventually, it becomes the white sugar that we eat.
Ryan Duffy, U.S. Sugar Director of Corporate Communications, said it goes into many different uses.
"Obviously, there's the candy and sweet products, but it's also used in things like medicine," he said.
Duffy said the process can't start without requesting a burn permit from the Florida Department of Agriculture. This is to protect people and the environment.
"To meet the requirements of getting a permit, individual fields have to be in the right location," Duffy said. "It has to not have issues with wind speed, direction, and inversion layers, which can trap smoke, ash and other impacts."
Concerns over U.S. Sugar are about more than just our air. Our water. Lake Okeechobee may also be impacted by farming.
"They’re not the whole pollution problem, but they are the biggest impediment to progress, the biggest hurdle, the Everglades restoration continuously has to overcome," said Chris Wittman with Captains for Clean Water.
The South Florida Water Management District will occasionally pump water to prevent flooding.
That's because what's in the water can help fuel blue-green algae blooms.
"You take water from that landscape, that falls on that landscape, picks up the fertilizer that’s in those hundreds and thousands of acres of sugarcane, and then it gets pushed back, bringing those fertilizers with them," Wittman said.
"It's done for flood control in these communities," Duffy said. "So, we're in the middle of the state, and the people that live here feel that we should have the same ability to have flood control the way that people have it on the coast."
When water does flow south of their farm, Duffy said Florida law requires U.S. Sugar to reduce phosphorus annually.
"The water leaves our farms cleaner than when we receive it, and that's a requirement under Florida law," Duffy said. "A 25% reduction of phosphorus that we've more than doubled over the last nearly 30 years."
The bottom line is that Wittman doesn't think sugar has to be made in the United States.
"The fact is there is a tariff on input sugar that is artificially elevating the cost of their product to the American people, and we could get high-quality sugar elsewhere," Wittman said.
However, Duffy and Plair do think producing sugar in their own country is important, and they love to do it.
"I think consumers would rather have their food grown here in the United States," Duffy said. "There's a national security benefit to that."
"It's early mornings, late nights, a lot of hours, but I just love being out here on the farm," Plair said.