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transport arrangements, harvest groups base daily loadings and harvesting schedules. Changes in farm
estimates during the season often occur and will therefore affect many of those facets identified
above.
Traditionally, mills used a proportional re-estimating program to determine the amount of change in
farm estimates. In its simplest form, this is the calculation of a ratio comparing the actual yield for an
area of harvested cane against the original estimate for that same area and applying the calculated
ratio to the remaining crop estimates for each farm.
The sugar industry has been using GPS as a management tool to keep records of the location of
various vehicles for a number of years. The first commercial GPS vehicle tracking system developed
in Australia was the GEOSTAT locomotive tracking system developed by Tully Sugar Limited and
GS Corporation in 1993 (Fuelling and Wright 1997).
Developments in harvest management systems have seen the mounting of GPS on harvesters to
monitor where harvesters have worked. Various harvester monitoring systems are currently in use
with the main components comprising data logger, GPS and modem.
Mackay Sugar developed a harvester monitoring system during the 2005 and 2006 seasons. MTData
tracking and data logging units form the basis for the harvester performance and tracking system. A
GPS tracking device records the position of the harvester and stores it in a data logger awaiting
transfer to a central web site. The MTData units include elevator on/off and engine on/off digital
inputs to allow the status of the machine to be determined.
Crossley and Dines (2004) undertook trials to integrate harvester tracking with a mill-based spatial
harvest recording system during the 2002 and 2003 seasons in the NSW mills. The hardware was a
dedicated system assembled by Transcom, and consisted of a data logger, GPS and a CDMA modem.
The data recorded by these units consisted of a series of positions of the harvester, and machine
status at those times.
Harvesters monitoring data was stored on the harvester for the day and uploaded to a central server
each night. A customised GIS software application called CHOMP (Centralised Harvest Operations
Management Program) was used to interpret the areas cut and maintain the paddock harvest status
from a map interface (Beattie and Crossley 2006). Figure 2.10 illustrates GPS harvester tracking in a
NSW harvested field.
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