Ledesma successfully closed Harvest Season 2021
Ledesma has finished its annual sugarcane harvesting season. Sugarcane is its raw material for the production of sugar, paper, alcohol, bioethanol, notebooks, filler paper and electrolytic products. With the end of the harvest, the production cycle continues in the mills, where sugar refining and packaging, alcohol distillation processes and paper production take place. With the vegetable residue from the sugarcane harvest, the company also produces renewable energy covering more than half of its energy matrix.
Ledesma annual production of sugar reached 291,000 tonnes. Ledesma sugarcane crushing amounted to 3,256,000 tonnes, segregated in 2,781,000 tonnes from self-owned plantations and 475,000 tonnes from independent plantations. This last group is really important since it maintains ongoing productive activities exceeding Ledesma’s management and expanding throughout Jujuy Province, mainly supported by producers and suppliers’ activities.
The company’s sugar production yield amounted to 10.54% (i.e. the amount of sugar produced per ton of cane), a higher yield compared to the one expected for 2021 but a lower one compared to 2020. It is worth mentioning that 2020 yields had reached an all-time record level (11.14%) mainly due to outstanding weather conditions.
During the harvest, Ledesma produced 54 million liters of alcohol, and expects to reach 85 million liters before the beginning of the next harvest, a higher figure compared to 2020. The recovery in gasoline demand is mainly based on an increase on economic activity. Out of the mentioned volume, 90% will be destined to bioethanol production for cars in Argentina, and the rest to pharmaceutical and liquor alcohol.
Ledesma estimates a packed paper production of 96,500 tonnes. The company has already been using its new mill to expand its production of Ledesma NAT paper, 100% sugarcane based and with 0% chemicals. All this equipment required a USD 4.5 million investment.
Technological transformation
During our last harvest, Ledesma launched a permanent 24-hour monitoring system to improve the efficiency of harvesting, planting and irrigation processes in the company’s agricultural fleet, which includes 526 devices placed in all its agricultural machinery (more than 300 tractors, 35 harvesters, all along with trucks, vans and ATVs, among others). Using the big data generated by this new system will gradually provide for new system’s features.
Ledesma has also put in place a new irrigation water management system called Rubicón. This system has some parameters which are set to operate the canal’s gates automatically and in real time, and thus distribute water in the exact measure as instructed by the management unit in the field. Rubicón is the leading international brand in water management technologies for canals.
