A source of food and power, sugar plays a key role in our lives. It fuels the body with energy and nutrients, and ethanol derived from sugarcane offers a carbon footprint that is 50 percent smaller than gasoline.

With almost 2 billion tons produced worldwide on 26 million hectares, sugarcane is a big business, but farming it is not without challenges. The fluctuating price of commodities, climate change, inconsistent yields, drought, pests and invasive plants and weeds must all be dealt with.

“We operate in a very dynamic environment where the regional and international situation must be continuously analyzed to ensure our sustainability,” said Rob Coombe, Group IT Manager at Royal Eswatini Sugar (RES), a large cane producer in southern Africa. Speaking at the recent SAP Sapphire event in Barcelona, Coombe added that technology will help the producer be more efficient, cultivate more sugarcane and reduce loss.

“I’m really excited about AI’s potential to improve business processes and increase efficiency,” said Coombe.

Creating the future

RES has a clear vision and strategy for running their agribusiness competitively and sustainably.

The company is located in the Kingdom of Eswatini, a land-locked country formerly known as Swaziland, almost entirely surrounded by South Africa. It employs over 3,500 people and produces two-thirds of the country’s sugar, along with 35.3m liters of ethanol a year on its own estates and farms on behalf of third parties. More than 2,500 families in the community are involved in cane production with RES providing housing and all infrastructure for its employees and their dependents.

“Sustainability is an extremely important topic for us; it’s the foundation of the future,” said Coombe. “We are very aware of deforestation. Thanks to satellite footage we collected over the past twenty years, and the work we’ve invested to manage forest cover, we can really see the progress in this area.”

Coombe went on to explain that cultivating sugarcane is actually more beneficial than maintaining the trees that were taken out, because the plantations are on sandy soil that doesn’t support rainforest vegetation.

“We’ve been collecting all the data and uploading it manually into the SAP Sustainability Control Tower which will help us monitor our environmental, social and governance metrics,” said Coombe.

The technology in the SAP stack has many other advantages. RES is already using SAP Intelligent Agriculture, an SAP industry cloud solution, to assist small growers in improving their yields and providing insights into the best time to harvest.

Designing solutions together

Built from input provided by the Efficiency and Sustainability Workgroup within the SAP Advisory Council for Agribusiness, the solution provides the farmers and RESs’ officers with the ability to plan, execute and measure key tasks.

The solution responds to RES’s need for a digital, service-based approach that coordinates and synchronizes all aspects of production from planning to shipping. The objective is to bring together external intelligence such as GPS, water and weather information along with supply chain data for fertilizers, equipment and logistics to create a sustainable system.

RES’s third party farmers needed greater support to know when, where and what to plant, where and how much to water and fertilize, and ensure the right equipment and labor were on hand to harvest and distribute.

“The SAP Advisory Council is a collection of CIOs and SAP employees who meet regularly to discuss technology in the agribusiness,” said Coombe, describing the select group of strategic SAP agribusiness customers that are willing to collaborate in an open environment with SAP to drive mutually beneficial objectives and improve the value of SAP solutions. “In all my years of IT, I have never been able to get this close to the development of software. This invitation only forum is what allowed this incredible solution to be developed, and I am very happy to be using it.”

Thanks to this innovative solution, RES is driving sugar growth efficiencies for itself and its out growers with real-time field data combined with external satellite and agronomic data.

Looking at the numbers

In addition to navigating the pressures from global warming and geopolitical conflicts, the RES’ siloed system landscape made it difficult to synchronize and coordinate information that could help out- growers increase their yields. With the SAP solution, RES has an innovative service platform that incorporates satellite imagery, maps, climate data and direct crop information, leading to increased yields, reduced costs, and improved sustainability.

“We’re proving that agriculture can run better with technology,” said Coombe.

AI and ML enabled a more targeted approach to meet the needs of farmers regarding seed, fertilization, irrigation and transport to help increase overall yields. RES experienced a 5.29% increase in amount of delivered cane thanks to the solution’s deep learning capability to combine agronomic data, satellite and weather modelling to determine the best date for harvesting. That additional yield added up to €4.8 million per year.

The technology also improved decision-making on harvesting when the crop is ripening using crop modelling, which resulted in about €155,000 savings per year.

“We were also able to increase forecast accuracy by 10%,” Coombe explained. “By better predicting cane yields, we could make better decisions on capital and operating expenses, impacting €8 million euro in cost per season.”

Not only are these results driving benefits to the health and wellbeing of the local community and society, RES is clearly an example to global farming organizations that it is possible to feed the world and create new sources of energy more sustainably.

To learn more about RES, watch this video and check out their participation in the SAP Innovation Awards 2024 here.