Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida
| Agricultural marketing cooperative | |
| Founded | July 1960 |
| Founder | George Wedgworth |
| Headquarters | Belle Glade, Florida, United States |
|
Area served
|
Florida |
| Products | raw sugar |
| Members | 54 |
| Website | www |
Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida is a vertically integrated agricultural enterprise that harvests, transports and processes sugarcane grown primarily in Palm Beach County, Florida and markets the raw sugar and blackstrap molasses through the Florida Sugar and Molasses Exchange. The Cooperative is made up of 45 grower-owners who produce sugarcane on approximately 70,000 acres of some of the most fertile farmland in America, located in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA). Sugarcane grown by Cooperative members is harvested, transported and processed. The raw sugar is then marketed to one of the ASR Group's sugar refineries. The Cooperative produces more than 350,000 tons of raw sugar annually.
The history of the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida dates back to the 1950s when 16 farmers met to discuss joining together with other farmers in the region known as the Glades Area, which is west of West Palm Beach, Florida, and southeast of Lake Okeechobee, to form a farming cooperative. The group's goal was to provide a means to harvest, mill, process, and market sugar and its by-products from a collective crop of sugarcane to bring stability to the growers operations. In July 1960, 54 farmer-members chartered Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida. In the years since then, the Cooperative has grown in scale and scope and is now a vertically integrated operation involved in the farming, processing, marketing, refining and distribution of cane sugar.
Collectively, the farmers of the Cooperative have all of the resources, technical and regulatory support, marketing and legal resources, usually afforded to only the largest farming operations. The Cooperative makes it possible for these family farmers to stay abreast of the most recent technological advancements in science to protect and preserve the environment and provide economic stability and viability in an increasingly complex global business.
In 2005, California and Hawaiian Sugar Company was acquired by American Sugar Refining (ASR, better known as Domino Sugar), a company owned by Florida Crystals and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida. Florida Crystals is a privately held company that is part of FLO-SUN, a sugar empire of the Fanjul family whose origins trace to Spanish-Cuban sugar plantations of the early 19th century.
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