In the Ingham district, Herbert Cane Productivity Services' harvest systems manager Mike Sexton has been fine-tuning the HELP Fuel Data Management System in local contractors' machines since 2005 and has produced some fascinating statistics.

The HELP technology monitors almost every system on the harvester, which is also fitted with GPS tracking, the onboard computer keeping tabs on fuel usage, basecutter, chopper and elevator use, fuel temperature, idle time, ground speed and bin weights.

This information is downloaded to a home PC and the software can display it at a contract, farm or block level and produce reports for each.

From that it is able to quantify the amount of time it took the harvester to do its work and how much it cost in fuel.

For instance, in one contract the machine spent seven percent of its time moving between blocks, 54pc of the time cutting cane, 29pc of its time turning around, and 9pc idling while waiting for the haulout gear to catch up after the turns.

The average pour rate of the machine was 101.4 tonnes/hour, the speed across the ground averaged 9km/h, bin weights ranged from 3.2-4.0 tonnes, and number of bins filled/hour ranged from 12-23.

Fuel usage varied by more than 40pc, depending on topography, length of drills and haulout distance, and ranged from 700ml/tonne of cane cut and hauled to 1.5 litres/tonne.

All the information can be displayed as graphs at a contract, farm or block level, so the farmer can see exactly how much each tonne of cane cost to harvest on each block on his property, enabling him to make changes to improve harvesting efficiency.