US Sugar Announces Tech Partnership

Clewiston, Florida-based U.S. Sugar on Tuesday announced a strategic technology partnership with Everglades Equipment Group, one of John Deere's largest dealerships with 19 locations in central and southern Florida.

"Through our work with John Deere and Everglades Equipment Group, we are continuing to push the limits of American innovation to produce food in a more economic and sustainable way," U.S. Sugar President and CEO Ken McDuffie stated in a company news release. "This partnership harnesses the very best precision agriculture technology currently available in American agriculture today."

The new partnership already deploys the latest Deere technologies across U.S. Sugar's sprawling 255,000-acre operation. This partnership creates a path for greater benefit from Deere's evolving technologies, U.S. Sugar and Everglades Equipment said.

"We are increasingly leveraging John Deere solutions as we stay focused on becoming the nation's lowest-cost sugar producer while advancing sustainable farming practices," Ryan Duffy, senior director of corporate communications at U.S. Sugar, told DTN/Progressive Farmer. "Our operations benefit from the scalable support of Everglades Equipment Group, whose partnership enhances our efficiency. In turn, the scale and demands of our operation provide critical insights that help both Everglades Equipment Group and John Deere improve the performance and reliability of equipment used by farmers around the world."

One immediate result of this technology agreement is a joint announcement on autonomy. U.S. Sugar and Everglades Equipment Group revealed that they are working collaboratively on an Autonomous Tractor Solution, which is in the research-and-development phase.

U.S. Sugar is the nation's largest, fully integrated producer of sugarcane and cane sugar, producing 850,000 tons of refined sugar annually. The operation also accounts for half of Florida's sweetcorn production, and it tends 1,000 acres of oranges.

For Scott Berden, precision ag manager at U.S. Sugar, the key result of collaboration with Everglades Equipment will be production efficiency and the ability to manage in real time.

"We're thankfully way past the days of physically going to a vehicle and putting a thumb drive in it and pulling data or pushing data," he said. "For our scale and size, that's huge."

U.S. Sugar operates 300 pieces of equipment, including 35 harvesters and 200 tractors, a powered inventory working over 21,000 fields.

Berden said Deere's Work Plans package is a good example of technology that improves productivity. Work Plans automates setup in the field, while removing operator guessing.

"Expecting an operator to go out to a specific field and tell you where they're at, is pretty tough," Berden said. "But to be able to pull up to the right field, to get the right guidance line, Work Plans are a huge benefit to us."

Additionally, it documents work completed. "If I send you to the field to go do some work today, we also know: Did you use the technology that we're paying for? If not, then we need to have a discussion," Berden said. "Maybe it's broken. Maybe we need to get somebody to come look at it. Maybe you haven't been trained properly. It's not to beat the operator over the head; it is trying to understand what the problem is."

U.S. Sugar measures the benefit of its technology applications. "If you look at the trend line of our production over the last 10 years, there's definitely a positive trend line, and some portion of that trend is related to precision ag," Berden said.

U.S. Sugar believes guidance accounts for a 15% to 20% reduction in overlap versus not having guidance. Deere's auto FieldCruise has improved U.S. Sugar's harvester fuel efficiency by 12% per hour while harvesting. It runs the engine at a lower RPM unless it needs more horsepower, and it'll automatically ramp that up based on this engine load.

As U.S. Sugar examines autonomous operations, there are solutions to be found beyond a tractor running with an operator in the cab. "I think automating the tractors, we're pretty close to being there today," said Berden. "There's a lot of technology already in the tractor, but it's everything around and behind the tractor that's not highly automated today. You know, a disk doesn't have a lot of intelligence around it to tell us how deep it is. Is a bearing going bad? So, again, it goes back to a sensor deal."

Berden said U.S. Sugar will be cautious removing operators from the cab. "We're not like hell bent on removing the operator," said Berden. "You might have an operator in the cab, looking for things that a sensor can't sense today."

Drivers of multiple autonomous tractors will have a different set of skills than the standard tractor driver today.

"If you got to operate five tractors, you're probably going to need a different skill set," Berden said. "And who's the right skill set to have? Is it an operator that's really good at running the vehicle, maybe the best one that just needs some more computer-type skills? I don't know. And, realistically, how many can one person run? As we learn and grow and test, what we don't want to do is overwhelm you, stress you out."

U.S. Sugar is using a wide array of Deere technology, all of it supported by Deere's Operations Center and Everglades Equipment, operating under the umbrella of U.S. Sugar's largest-in-the-nation private Wi-Fi network. Here are some of those technologies:

-- JDLink: Connects equipment to provide machine data -- machine health and operational data -- to John Deere's Operations Center.

-- Work Plans: Sends field boundaries, guidance lines and tasks to machines that will auto-detect when entering the field. Removes operator guessing.

-- Efficiency Manager: Optimizes fuel efficiency and performance by automatically adjusting transmission gear and engine speed. Shifts up and throttles back in light load conditions. Shifts down and throttles up in heavy load conditions.

-- Multi-Section Dry Fertilizer Applicators: Provides operators with the ability to use section control by row to control fertilizer usage.

-- The strategic partnership also leverages the latest John Deere sugarcane harvester technology, including auto idle (reduces speed when hydraulics are not in use), FieldCruise (helps maintain consistent field speed), and SmartClean (optimizes the cleaning process of sugarcane harvesters by automatically adjusting the primary extractor fan speed to balance cane cleanliness and minimizing loss).

-- T3rra Cutta Landforming software: Use of RTK drones to survey field elevations and design the desired field level control file. Ultimately improves GPS land leveling and water retention capabilities. RTK technology helps to increase the accuracy of drone surveying results.

Dan Miller can be reached at dan.miller@dtn.com

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