Clewiston-based U.S. Sugar Corp. has begun its 2007-08 harvesting season, delivering sugar cane to its new state-of-the-art automated manufacturing plant.

The plant can process up to 42,000 tons of cane per day.

The company plans to harvest about 162,946 acres, yielding an estimated 6.2 million tons of sugar cane and 13 million 100-pound bags of refined sugar. This crop will be similar in size to last year’s crop, and reflects damage from drought and lingering impacts from hurricanes.

“The culmination of three years of hard work and strategic planning amidst ongoing operations, our Clewiston facility is now the world’s largest fully integrated cane sugar mill and refinery,” said Robert Coker, a senior vice president, in a news release. “It will allow us to be the lowest cost sugar producer in the United States and a lower cost producer than Mexican sugar facilities.”

Free trade agreements are bringing more foreign sugar into the U.S. market. The new plant is aimed at ensuring that U.S. Sugar remains competitive in the future.

The construction project, called “Breakthrough,” consolidated the company’s two older raw sugar milling operations. Started in October 2005, it was at one time the largest private industrial construction project in the country, according to the news release.

“The entire Breakthrough project was planned and implemented in 36 months. It’s too bad we weren’t able to get the weather on the schedule. We have a state-of-the-art processing facility, but our crops are still recovering from multiple hurricane damage during the worst drought on record,” Coker said.

U.S. Sugar’s railroad network will deliver about 1,000 40-ton railcars of sugar cane from area fields to the Clewiston Mill each day. Inside the mill, the automated system is operated from a centralized control room with flat-screen televisions monitoring the progress.