Trick, Treat or Technology? Precision Agriculture in Florida's Sugarcane Industry

Happy Halloween from FRE Lunch!

While millions of people around the U.S. are getting ready to celebrate and fill their trick or treating bags with delicious candy, the FRE Lunch podcast sat down with UF Double Gator and Master of Agribusiness alumni Joshua Jantz to learn more about how the implementation of precision agriculture technology by his company, U.S. Sugar is helping maximize efficiency and sustainability in the production of sugarcane, one of the sweeteners responsible for many of our favorite Halloween Treats!

More Resources:

• U.S. Sugar Website: https://www.ussugar.com/
• AskIFAS : https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/collections/sugarcane_cultural_practices

The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their sole responsibility do not represent positions, policies or opinion of the University of Florida, UF/IFAS, or the UF/IFAS Department of Food and Resource Economics.

Got thoughts on the episode, questions for us, or an idea for what we should cover next? Reach out to us by email at fre@ifas.ufl.edu

Intro and Outro Music - "Just Kidding" - Ahjay Stelino. Used under the Mixkit Stock Music Free License.

Transcript

00;00;01;02 - 00;00;08;28

Alena Poulin & Caleb Stair

[Singing] Marginal revenue, marginal cost, welcome to FRE Lunch!

00;00;09;00 - 00;00;12;15

Caleb Stair

Happy holidays from FRE Lunch!

00;00;12;17 - 00;00;18;11

Alena Poulin

To celebrate, we got you a gift! A very special, seasonal season of FRE lunch.

00;00;18;13 - 00;00;21;11

Caleb Stair

Are you allowed to say seasonal twice like that?

00;00;21;18 - 00;00;25;10

Alena Poulin

Anywayy … for anyone who just got here, I'm Alena Poulin…

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Caleb Stair

And I'm Caleb. Stair,

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Alena Poulin

and this is the official podcast of the Food and Resource Economics department at the University of Florida.

00;00;32;17 - 00;00;44;06

Caleb Stair

Each episode of this mini season will provide a bite sized insight into economic aspects of your favorite holiday traditions, and the hardworking producers who make them possible.

00;00;44;07 - 00;00;50;26

Alena Poulin

With that, we hope you'll enjoy the season and on with the episode.

00;00;50;29 - 00;00;54;19

Caleb Stair

[In Dracula Voice] Happy Halloween everyone!

00;00;54;21 - 00;01;02;10

Alena Poulin

Um….Anyways, from precision Agriculture to Pixie Stix, today's spooky October episode is all about sugar cane.

00;01;02;13 - 00;01;05;16

Caleb Stair

[In Dracula Voice] Thank goodness we didn't discuss garlic.

00;01;05;19 - 00;01;07;27

Alena Poulin

Are you going to be doing that voice the whole time?

00;01;08;04 - 00;01;16;23

Caleb Stair

I…Fine. Did you know that Americans purchased nearly 600 million pounds of candy each year for Halloween?

00;01;17;00 - 00;01;22;10

Alena Poulin

It takes a whole lot of sugar to make that much candy. And sugar doesn't just grow on trees.

00;01;22;13 - 00;01;26;09

Caleb Stair

That's right. Actually, it's a grass, a perennial grass.

00;01;26;15 - 00;01;38;20

Alena Poulin

Exactly. So while you've heard that the grass is always greener on the other side in Florida, it's actually sweeter. You see, sugar cane is one of the essential raw material sources of manufactured sugar.

00;01;38;23 - 00;01;46;11

Caleb Stair

And while many of us think of citrus when it comes to Florida, we are also one of the largest sugar cane producing regions in the country.

00;01;46;13 - 00;01;56;06

Alena Poulin

Most of the sugar cane is produced along the southern and southeastern shores of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, where the growing season is long and the winter is generally warm.

00;01;56;06 - 00;02;00;19

Caleb Stair

To manage that much sugar cane requires time and effort.

00;02;00;20 - 00;02;05;22

Alena Poulin

Especially if you're trying to also be sustainable and handle a changing workforce.

00;02;05;24 - 00;02;11;28

Caleb Stair

So with Halloween right around the corner, we thought it would be a good idea to see how all that sugar is produced.

00;02;12;03 - 00;02;19;00

Alena Poulin

And that's why today's episode is all about taking a look behind the scenes at how sugar cane is grown in Florida.

00;02;19;07 - 00;02;25;13

Caleb Stair

And to help us out, we are joined by one of our alumni and a production supervisor for US. Sugar

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Joshua Jantz

So my name is Josh Jantz and I'm a production supervisor for U.S sugar. I work at management areas for one of our seven management areas, and I also oversee our internal mechanical planting crew. Prior to that, and actually just recently I just finished my Master's of Agribusiness here at UF and I have my bachelor's from there as well.

00;02;41;03 - 00;02;49;22

Alena Poulin

Now, Josh started out with degrees in agricultural operations management and animal sciences, meaning his path to sugar wasn't the most linear.

00;02;49;24 - 00;03;17;16

Joshua Jantz

So yeah, it's kind of a strange shift, especially with an animal science background. I grew up in Highlands County, so right around one of our farming areas, we actually had a management area in Highlands County now. So I kind of got my first taste of the sugar industry touring the US sugar late in high school. After that, I ran into needing an internship towards the end of my undergrad and went through a seminar where US Sugar was coming to  talk and found a lot of interest with it. I wanted to see if I really wanted to go to the animal sciences or not. And I ended up doing the internship and I fell in love with it. And the rest is history.

00;03;17;19 - 00;03;28;03

Caleb Stair

Now, sugar cane might not necessarily be the crop that you associate with the Sunshine State, but our warm weather and soil make for prime real estate in this industry.

00;03;28;06 - 00;04;09;02

Joshua Jantz

So historically, when you think of domestic production, you think of Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Hawaii. Over the years, that's kind of become a little bit more condensed in the modern day. In the modern era, you think of Louisiana and Florida as your main players. Louisiana actually has the greatest acreage kind of cluster around the home of Baton Rouge Thibodaux area, and it's actually expanding north over there. So they beat us in acreage. But having a catch 22, we tend to be more productive in terms of sugar. And that's largely due to our highly nutrient rich soil types and our longer growing seasons. You know, we have a very good subtropical climate here in South Florida. We have multiple different soil types. We have mucky soils that are very nutrient rich, sandy soils, and some traditional that offer a little bit of extra gain. And all of that is just a kind of a perfect storm for sugar cane to do well.

00;04;09;05 - 00;04;14;03

Alena Poulin

It's like any other industry. Sugar cane is faced with its own unique challenges.

00;04;14;04 - 00;04;20;01

Caleb Stair

Challenge number one, according to Josh, is a lack of knowledge about how our food system works.

00;04;20;04 - 00;04;32;04

Joshua Jantz

The information gap that you see across the entire agricultural sector is always present, of course. Trying to educate consumers and show them the different aspects of what we do and how we do is always a continuing thing that we're working on.

00;04;32;07 - 00;04;40;12

Alena Poulin

One specific topic that is always important when it comes to education and management is environmental quality and sustainability.

00;04;40;14 - 00;04;57;11

Joshua Jantz

When you kind of hone in on the sugar cane sector, environmental quality and sustainability is always at the top of your mind. So talking about air quality, something that we do education on and try to demonstrate to our consumers, we do a lot of monitoring on that as well. And we've shown that our air quality is consistently better in our farming communities than it is in other areas of the state.

00;04;57;13 - 00;05;04;29

Caleb Stair

For those of you who were tuned in last season, BMPs or Best Management Practices might sound familiar.

00;05;05;00 - 00;05;11;13

Alena Poulin

These BMPs are one way that producers like U.S. sugar can help preserve water quality as well.

00;05;11;16 - 00;05;44;21

Joshua Jantz

The bigger issue that's been a long term player for us has been water quality. So ever since the impementation on the Everglades Forever Act in 1994, we've had a requirement to reduce our annual reduction in phosphorus emissions outperformed. So, in saying that, we're really the only farmers in the United States that are required to reduce the nutrients in the water that exits our farms. And since 1996, we've demonstrated an average of 57% reduction in phosphorus emissions. That stems from a long term partnership. That's been a major key advantage for us that we have with UF/IFAS who help us develop our best management practices that we adhere to to get that reduction.

00;05;44;24 - 00;05;52;11

Caleb Stair

In addition to all the concerns about how we produce sugar cane, the industry has a concern about who will do the producing.

00;05;52;12 - 00;06;14;18

Joshua Jantz

Kind of a big issue we see from operations standpoint is just the growing age gap amongst the farming community. We have a very large aging workforce and we don't have a high replacement rate. So as we get to that point of higher retirements, we don't have necessarily have experienced labor to replace them. So a way that we kind of help rectify that, and it also plays into our sustainability aspects is a high investment in agricultural technologies.

00;06;14;25 - 00;06;26;26

Alena Poulin

For those of you not in the know, precision agriculture is a type of operations management to maximize efficiency, making it possible to grow more using less well of everything.

00;06;26;28 - 00;06;30;03

Caleb Stair

It does this with the most cutting edge technology.

00;06;30;06 - 00;06;39;29

Joshua Jantz

When you start thinking about precision technology, that's not as simple as it used to be. You know, with the technology revolution that we've seen over the recent years and high levels of advancement, it's become very diverse and wide scale.

00;06;40;01 - 00;06;47;22

Alena Poulin

For Josh, there are lots of different ways that precision agriculture is integrated into the day to day operations of his job at U.S. sugar.

00;06;47;25 - 00;07;08;27

Joshua Jantz

Kind of a little fun fact also about U.S. Sugar as a company is we have the largest privately owned Wi-Fi network to the best of my knowledge still, and that's something we developed as we continue to expand our operations. More kind of considerations when you get to that technology side. We have a lot of investment fertilizer and agrochemical grade control that helps us use the bare minimum nutrients possible across our fields and our crops.

00;07;09;00 - 00;07;15;05

Caleb Stair

While some technology expands our capabilities, others address previously mentioned issues.

00;07;15;08 - 00;07;37;22

Joshua Jantz

You know, the first thing that kind of comes to mind is Autosteer guidance. And that gets back to helping out with the experienced labor issue. When we have that autosteer, we can assign an operator to a piece of equipment and we can put them in, and it's going to help them be more efficient and be more effective with their pass, and also free them up quite a bit. So you don't have to be a seasoned veteran riding a tractor to get in a piece of equipment, auto steer, and still do the task. It's a very great aid for our operators.

00;07;37;25 - 00;07;45;23

Alena Poulin

These technologies also allow for a more efficient use of our resources, which is better for both the environment and the bottom line.

00;07;45;27 - 00;08;13;09

Joshua Jantz

We also invest a lot in products from a company called Cell Phone Tech that helps to optimize our harvest operations. Kind of think of it like Uber is kind of how we describe it. We have farmers in the field, and we have haul tractors that take our harvested cane to our elevators on our rail cars. The cell phone tech helps to optimize that by basically assigning a cane tractor that's hauling our cane to go back to a particular harvester in the most efficient manner possible, which therefore, you know, optimizes our time, optimize their emissions, and helps to be more sustainable.

00;08;13;11 - 00;08;36;09

Caleb Stair

So you kind of hit on the next question there, which is what are the economic motivators which you've kind of addressed. You said you're dealing with the changing nature of the labor force that ag. has to source from. You're trying to be more sustainable to address the concerns of the population, and you're trying to be more efficient, get more out of each input you're using. Are there any other economic factors that might be driving you to transition to more precision ag?

00;08;36;11 - 00;09;00;19

Joshua Jantz

I think that's a great summary, Caleb. And that's that's really the kind of the bare bones aspects of it. But we're really looking at the end of the day to be as sustainable as possible. And by using our precision technology, that's really our driver. And the big thing for us is we want to use the absolute bare minimum level of nutrients on every field. That gets back to our sustainability, that gets back to the Everglades forever Act, and our BMPs. And that really is kind of our bread and butter is we want to use the absolute bare minimum as we can.

00;09;00;21 - 00;09;09;18

Alena Poulin

It was Josh's interest in building upon the strengths of his previous degrees that led him back to the University of Florida to pursue the Master of Agribusiness program.

00;09;09;20 - 00;09;57;12

Joshua Jantz

As I was nearing the end of my undergrad, you know, the ag operations management program or animal science program, they both have a lot of inherent strengths. I learned a lot about operations management, obviously, but I felt that I was kind of lacking in a business analytical side of things and knew that would be important going forward. So I started looking in, trying to assess different programs and, you know, where would be the best fit for me and the MAB program popped up. You know, it was very appealing being that it was fully online, that it was, you know, still a business absence, but with a focus on agriculture. And that really appealed to me in the small program size. And it was one of the best things I made in my educational career. I took away a lot of good, good information. I'd say the biggest thing that I took away from it outside incidental business knowledge, was the ability to think more critically, more about things, and having that toolset to do more in-depth analytics from a business standpoint across all the different projects I'm involved in.

00;09;57;14 - 00;10;11;10

Caleb Stair

Now, the biggest part of our MAB program is the capstone. For students, this is a real world internship or special project which allows them to apply the knowledge and skills they have gained to their particular interests.

00;10;11;10 - 00;10;21;17

Alena Poulin

Josh's project focused on looking at the pros and cons of using a type of precision agriculture called mechanical planting to alleviate labor costs.

00;10;21;20 - 00;11;21;02

Joshua Jantz

So the capstone actually kind of aligned with a project that I started working on right around the time I started with the company, actually. So like I said earlier, I'm over our mechanical planting internal crew. So mechanical planting within the industry is not the industry standard. When you plant sugarcane, it's typically done through hand labor with sugar cane displaying different vegetative propagation. So we cut a standing stalk of sugar cane that we use to proceed. We drop it in a furrow and it germinates from the different eyes that are on that stalk. With mechanical planting, we're using a sugar cane harvester, typically equipped with a seed kit that helps to reduce our damage, to load it into a mechanized planter and go and deliver it to a field. It has inherent challenges and benefits that we look at, and it is an expanding operation, not just in Florida, but especially in Louisiana. In Louisiana, we've seen it taken off like wildfire over recent years. So with my crew, we travel across all of our farming areas and we perform production level planting, but we still do research activities on the side to try to refine our operations and align us to a position that long term, we could expand this.

00;11;21;04 - 00;11;27;18

Caleb Stair

The trade off with mechanical planting currently is that it requires less labor, but more seeds.

00;11;27;19 - 00;11;41;11

Joshua Jantz

When you compared the hand planting activities or mechanical planting activities, you see a dramatic increase in seeds for mechanical planting activities. I'd say it's, you know, twice as much, if not three times as much seed utilized. And that's a large opportunity cost through.

00;11;41;11 - 00;11;46;26

Alena Poulin

Lots of testing, Josh’s project has worked to reduce the amount of seeds that are used.

00;11;46;29 - 00;11;54;11

Joshua Jantz

So we do a lot of testing to see how can we reduce our seed use. How can we bolster our germination, and how can we maximize our productivity with these machines?

00;11;54;12 - 00;11;59;29

Caleb Stair

To figure out if these changes are successful requires a lot of analysis.

00;12;00;02 - 00;12;44;16

Joshua Jantz

Other aspects of that through we do a lot of tracking of our data. So we try to identify our weak points like we do with anything in operation. We try to identify weak points in the damage to the billets, which is our major driver of increasing use, depressed germination. We looked at it before we cut a field. We assess it, we assess it behind the harvesters. We assess it as soon as it comes out, the plants in the furrow by hand. And I also go back and reassessing it this year with drones utilizing some software to kind of get a better view and some quantitative data to compare our different tests. And the last major thing that I've done as part of the capstone is we're looking at ten years of historical plant and harvest data. So we're kind of trying to compare, you know, mechanized planting and hand planting activities, what our yields look like, what our seed use looks like, and really pinpoint our opportunity cost.

00;12;44;23 - 00;12;51;15

Alena Poulin

The goal of all this testing and analysis is to identify the best path forward for sugar cane production.

00;12;51;20 - 00;13;17;14

Joshua Jantz

When you get into mechanized planting, you have a lot less labor involved. And as you try to advance this, advance this technology, you're able to reduce your emissions to the less, prevent less labor. But we really don't have a good idea of what the opportunity cost of that is. And that is what the cost benefit of trade off is between hand mechanic planting. So that's something I'm working on. And we want to see what our yields are. Are we seeing improvement over time? Is there a way we can kind of plug this into a monte Carlo analysis style of the data. And really assess what we have going on?

00;13;17;17 - 00;13;46;12

Caleb Stair

Okay. And then to wrap up this episode, we're hoping it's going to release sometime in October, right around with Halloween when sugar consumption in the United States tends to be a little bit higher. And these episodes are designed to give people a 15-minute glimpse into various aspects of an event or an industry that they weren't familiar with before. So with that in mind, is there one key takeaway, or what is a key takeaway you would want to leave one of our listeners with.

00;13;46;15 - 00;14;50;10

Joshua Jantz

A key takeaway that I would always I always emphasize the people I talk to is, you know, make sure that you take the time and different opportunities to kind of learn more about what we're doing here as farmers. You know, it's it's a very I wouldn't say sheltered, but there's not a lot of information out there generally where it's hard to access sometimes. And we do our best to push that out to people. But it's important that everybody takes the time to learn. At the end of the day, we're just family farmers that are working to support our families, and we live in communities that we farming our sustainability, our product, our consumer safety is paramount at the end of the day. And we love to inform people. We love to tell people what we do down here. You know, if you come ask any of us, if you run into somebody from US sugar or any of the sugar producers down here, we're happy to take the time to talk to you and tell you the different things we're doing. Kind of one of the opportunities. And this isn't a plug, by any sense for the means, but something that we do is kind of cool that some people may have heard of, some may haven’t, is we actually have the Sugar Express, which is an old restored locomotive with restored cars that we run here. It's open to, you know, the general public to get tickets to ride on a really cool train and take the opportunity while are there to learn more about what we do as farmers down here and learn more about our communities through the different stops.

00;14;50;10 - 00;14;54;15

Alena Poulin

As we reach the end of today's episode, we want to thank Josh for joining us today.

00;14;54;15 - 00;15;04;15

Caleb Stair

And we want to emphasize the point that there are many fun activities, like consuming candy for Halloween that are supported by the day in, day out efforts of farmers.

00;15;04;17 - 00;15;12;24

Alena Poulin

This is a topic that we plan to touch on throughout the rest of the season, but for now, we'll leave you here with some links in the description below to learn more. If you're interested.

00;15;12;24 - 00;15;20;14

Caleb Stair

We hope you will join us next episode. Until then, [Dracula Voice] be sure to keep your blood sugar up [evil laughter]

00;15;20;16 - 00;15;21;25

Alena Poulin

Happy Halloween everyone!