HARVEST HAUL MODEL--THE COST OF HARVESTING PADDOCKS OF SUGARCANE ACROSS A SUGAR MILLING REGION

COMPETITIVENESS of the Australian sugar industry against declining terms of trade in the global market is an increasing issue for the industry. While advances have been made in individual sectors, future innovation is likely to be based on optimising the farming, harvesting, transport and milling value chain as a whole. Several mill regions are exploring opportunities to reduce the cost of harvesting and cane transport for the local industry. This required the development of a model, called the Harvest Haul Model, to quantify the performance of the harvesting sector on a regional scale. This model is integrated with other component models to provide a whole-of-system modelling capability to assess the regional impacts to the harvesting and growing sector from big picture changes in harvesting, such as the reduced number of groups. The Harvest Haul Model is a database application that estimates the cost of harvesting each paddock of sugarcane on a farm, in a harvesting group, or across a sugar milling region. The initial purpose for the Harvest Haul Model was to quantify the overall gains to a region by changing from standard harvesting practice to Harvest Best Practice (HBP) methods. HBP encourages harvesters to reduce fan speed and elevator pour rate, which reduces cane loss. The model was also developed to conduct scenario analyses looking at the effects on: harvesting and hauling of changing harvesting hours; harvesting group numbers, content and size; and also changing cane railway siding locations, which change haul-out distances. As gathering region-wide data is an enormous task, GIS methods were used to calculate estimates for row length and haul-out distance for each block of cane in the region. Surveys were conducted to estimate the type and value of capital equipment used in the region and some assumptions were made from previous research. Results of scenario analyses have shown that, while the region gains from the uptake of harvesting best practice, the harvesting sector returns decrease, emphasising a need to develop a more equitable payment method. The Harvest Haul Model was applied to the Mourilyan sugar mill region for quantifying the effect of introducing HBP and reducing the number of harvesting groups.