Soon after the July Product Committee meeting in South American which was held for the first time at the Valtra factory Moji das Cruzes, Brazil, a group of visitors which included Sr. VP’s Gary Ball and Dexter Schaible visited one of the Sugar and Alcohol plants of the group Virgolino de Oliveira in the State of São Paulo.

At the mill, popularly known as “Usina Catanduva” because of its location next to the town of Catanduva, they were received by its Superintendent Director Mr Hermelindo Ruette de Oliveira. The main objective of the visit was to see the potential for technology applications onboard Valtra tractors especially for automatic guidance systems.

Catanduva was the first mill to invest in this new technology in 2003 and currently have 14 Valtra BH180 tractors equipped with guidance systems. The sugar cane mill has already seen gains through increased operational efficiency and is also hoping to gain on sugar cane productivity by reducing stamping of the cane during cultivation and harvesting. Today the first operation – planting - still relies on the operator to draw the first wayline, however in the future their objective is to plan the most efficient way to do the job in the office and only execute the plan on the tractor.