Friday, March 29, 2024

Rain brings harvest peak worry

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Bay of Plenty kiwifruit growers have tentatively started harvest efforts while warily casting an eye over MetService forecasts for more heavy rain in a region already well saturated.
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Parts of Bay of Plenty received four times the average March rainfall in two recent downpours and the damp weather had slowed the rise in brix (sugar) levels critical for determining harvest dates.

This week Zespri was reporting a harvest of seven million trays of early SunGold fruit out of an expected 14m trays with brix levels also struggling to rise in Green varieties.

While not a cause for concern yet and still ahead of last year’s even later harvest, the delay threatened to put greater pressure on harvesting, packing and shipping resources in the critical high-value, early season period.

It came as SunGold fruit volumes rose to record levels with estimates of a 40m tray harvest this season, up from 27.5m last year.

Leighton Oats, general operations manager for big kiwifruit growing company Baygold, hoped to harvest between rain bouts.

Baygold owned and oversaw 220ha of kiwifruit orchards, of which 180ha were SunGold. That area made it one of the larger growing companies, employing 35 permanent staff but ramping up to 240 at the peak of picking when up to 600t or about 180,000 tray equivalents a day might be harvested.

“Sugar levels were rising well until we got 450mm in two separate dumps of rain and more is forecast for next week, of at least another 80-90mm.”

The fruit was above average size and was packing out well with 93% making Class 1.

Several weeks ago he had expected the group would have 50-60% of its fruit make the higher earning Kiwistart early harvest premium but the slowing effect of the wet weather had knocked that back to possibly as low as 5-10%.

After the high winds experienced until late January there had been concern fruit would have considerably more damage that it had and he attributed that to having more mature SunGold vines, five years or older.

With quality looking good, his concerns were around whether that later harvest might result in a shortage of itinerant workers who had not stuck around waiting for a break in the weather.

Baygold had made good use of the Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme and its numbers were up slightly this year, with 40 people largely from Tanna Island in Vanuatu.

Like many in the industry Baygold made a two-way investment in the islanders’ wellbeing. That included helping ship a sawmill to Tanna after Cyclone Pam struck in 2015 to help mill the many trees felled by high winds.

The company also helped with an Earthship project to provide shelter during a cyclone.

In 2014 Baygold bought the old Paeangaroa motor camp to accommodate RSE workers and some permanent staff.

“Baygold is committed to ensuring that their RSE team are well supported and looked after while in NZ and that has included investing in running health programmes with them,” Oats said.

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