U.S. Sugar Begins 82nd Annual Sugarcane Harvest

Oct. 1, 2012 - PRLog -- U.S. Sugar began its 82nd annual sugarcane harvesting and processing season at 4 am Monday with harvest operations in Palm Beach, Hendry and Glades counties.  A few hours later, the Clewiston Sugar Factory, which set single tandem milling records last season, began processing the first railcars of cane that afternoon.  Both the harvesting and processing operations run 24/7 during the sugarcane harvest season that runs through early April.
 
"Weather permitting, we expect to harvest and process a good sugarcane crop, very similar in size to last year’s,” said Judy Sanchez, senior director of corporate communications and public affairs.  "We also expect our sugar milling and refining operations to continue the record-setting pace of the last several years.”

Sanchez said that U.S. Sugar expects to produce about 7.1 million tons of sugarcane, harvesting approximately 6.56 million tons of sugarcane for processing at the Clewiston Sugar Factory.  As a result of the Company’s acquisition of DUDA sugarcane operations in Belle Glade, U.S. Sugar will continue to deliver contracted cane to the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida and Florida Crystal’s mills.  The Clewiston Refinery is projected to produce 15.4 million hundred-weight (770,000 tons) of refined sugar.  The Refinery also will import approximately 1.8 million hundred-weight (90,000 tons) of foreign raw sugar to be refined and marketed.  

For the 2011-12 crop, U.S. Sugar produced 7.4 million tons of sugarcane, with 6.55 million tons of that processed in Clewiston, producing 773,000 tons of raw sugar, 41 million gallons of molasses and nearly 200,000 MWhrs of electricity.

“Many South Floridians do not realize that our sugarcane produces green renewable energy that replaces 70 million gallons of fuel oil or 1.63 million barrels of fossil fuels each year,” Sanchez said.  “U.S. Sugar produced enough clean, green renewable energy to power the equivalent of more than 20,000 households for a year.”

All of the company’s refined sugar products are marketed by United Sugars Corporation, a marketing cooperative that includes U.S. Sugar and beet sugar farmers and processors American Crystal Sugar and Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative.

U.S. Sugar’s state-of-the-art sugar milling and refining operations make its Clewiston Sugar Factory the world’s largest fully integrated and automated cane sugar processing facility.