Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida

The Cooperative, alongside its industry partners, support the federal sugar program, a system of import quotas and price support loans that, according to a Cato Institute analysis, keep domestic sugar prices at approximately twice the world-market average. ^{4 5 6 7}

Background

In 1960, several family farms formed a group to construct a sugar cane mill in Palm Beach County, south Florida. The effort was chartered as the “Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida” as the families, who had been planting a variety of produce, decided to focus on sugar cane. The farming families and those who joined their ranks over the decades continue to guide the Cooperative. As of 2026, the Cooperative was made up of 44 small-to-medium sugar cane farmers. ^{8 1 3}

In 1998, Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida joined forces with Florida Crystals Corporation to form a strategic partnership concerning the large-scale refining of raw sugar. This formed the basis for what became the world’s most successful cane sugar company, ASR Group. ⁸

According to a 2025 estimate, the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative and Florida Crystals Corporation jointly accounted for 60 percent of the sugar cane industry in Florida, which produces the most sugar cane of any state. ⁸

Activities

The Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida’s core functions are harvesting, transporting, and milling sugar cane grown by its member-growers and marketing the resulting raw sugar and blackstrap molasses. Each season, the Cooperative harvests about 70,000 acres, producing more than three million tons of sugar cane. It also operates one of the largest sugar mills in the world, which grinds about 26,000 tons of sugar cane per day during harvest season. The mill also makes use of bagasse, or the fibrous part of the stalk, as a fuel source, which it claims conserves over 31 million gallons of oil annually. ^{9 10}

Members retain ownership of their farms but supply the Cooperative with sugar cane, receiving proceeds from the marketed sugar in proportion to their contribution. As of 2026, the Cooperative reported producing more than 400,000 tons of raw sugar annually, along with millions of gallons of blackstrap molasses sold primarily as livestock feed in export markets. ^{11 9}

Lobbying

As of 2026, the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida was a member of the American Sugar Alliance, the principal lobbying organization for American sugar producers, as well as the Florida Sugar Cane League, the Florida-based industry association. The American Sugar Alliance spent $1.3 million on federal lobbying in 2009. The Cooperative itself maintained a federal political action committee (PAC) that spent $128,500 in the 2022 election cycle and $123,500 in the 2024 election cycle, making contributions to members of the House Agriculture Committee and other legislators supportive of the federal sugar program, a system of import quotas and price support loans that, according to a Cato Institute analysis, keep domestic sugar prices at approximately twice the world-market average. ^{4 5 6 7}

Controversies

EAA Reservoir Lawsuit

In 2021, the Sugar Cane Cooperative joined United States Sugar Corporation and Okeelanta Corporation (a Florida Crystals subsidiary) in filing a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, claiming that the Corps’ design and operation plan for the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir (EAA), the central project of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, threatened the 500,000 acre-feet of Lake Okeechobee water the companies claimed they were owed for irrigation under a “savings clause” of the Water Resources Development Act of 2000. Environmental groups and Everglades restoration advocates argued the suit, if successful, would redirect a publicly funded restoration reservoir to serve as a private irrigation supply for the sugar industry. A federal district court ruled against the companies in 2023; on March 25, 2025, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling, finding the companies’ interpretation of the savings clause to be inconsistent with the law and, in the Everglades Foundation director Eric Eikenberg’s paraphrase of the Court’s decision, “both meritless and ‘strange.’” ^{12 13 14 15}

Sugar Cane Burning Class Action

On June 4, 2019, two Palm Beach County residents, Clover Coffie and Jennie Thompson, filed a federal class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against the Cooperative, United States Sugar Corporation, Florida Crystals, and ten other sugar-cane growers and refiners. The complaint alleged that pre-harvest burning of sugar cane fields caused toxic ash (known locally as “black snow”) to fall on neighboring communities. The affected area comprised three ZIP codes in western Palm Beach County that were predominantly Black and Hispanic, a figure which activist organizations such as the Sierra Club cited to further a narrative of so-called structural racism. Investigators for the Palm Beach County Health Department had completed at least three air-quality studies over two decades, raising alarms about the practice. A May 2020 ruling by U.S. District Judge Rodney Smith substantially narrowed the complaint, dismissing four of seven counts and citing Florida’s Right to Farm Act. On February 25, 2022, the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the case with prejudice; the sugar companies stated there was no settlement. ^{16 17 18}

Leadership

As of 2026, Matthew Hoffman was president and CEO of the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, a position he had held since 2010.  ¹⁹

George Wedgworth, the Cooperative’s founder and longtime chairman, was inducted into the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame in 1994 and named Sugar Man of the Year in 2005. He died in November 2016 at the age of 88. The Cooperative’s headquarters building at 1500 George Wedgworth Way in Belle Glade bears his name.  ^{20 21}