Clewiston, FL - October 8, 2007  - U.S. Sugar began its 2007-08 sugarcane harvest season, delivering sugarcane to the Company’s newly enlarged and automated sugar manufacturing facility that has a processing capacity of 42,000 tons of cane per day. The company plans to harvest approximately 162,946 acres, yielding an estimated 6.2 million tons of sugarcane and 13 million cwt of refined sugar.  This crop will be similar in size to last year’s crop, with residual damage from the hurricanes and the drought.

“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, Senior Vice President, Public Affairs. “It will allow us to be the lowest cost sugar producer in the United States and a lower cost producer than Mexican sugar facilities.”

According to Coker, free trade agreements and negotiations with additional sugar-producing foreign countries mean more foreign sugar entering the U.S. market.  The increased efficiency of the new milling operations is aimed at ensuring that U.S. Sugar is competitive into the future.

The construction project, termed “Breakthrough” for its dramatic consolidation and transformation of the Company’s two older raw sugar milling operations, incorporates the best sugar technology from around the world.  Initiated in October 2005, it was at one time the largest private industrial construction project in the United States.   The project was completed in three, one-year phases concurrent with ongoing harvest and milling activities.  Phase III, which included the demolition of 90 major pieces of equipment, installation of 262 new pieces of equipment and 284,000 construction man-hours, was completed just before the harvest began.

“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 approximately 1000 40-ton railcars of sugarcane from area sugarcane 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 major processes.  The cane stalks are crushed to release the juice from the fibrous stalk. While the juice is processed into sugar, the remaining cane fiber serves as the clean, renewable energy source for both the raw sugar mill and adjacent cane sugar refinery, making the process extremely energy efficient.