But the demand for skilled staff is expected to extend from orchard to outlet with industry efforts ramping up to make the industry an appealing one to talented school-leavers.
The industry’s school leaving initiative, Cultivate Your Career, recently attracted 280 Western Bay of Plenty students and gave them a first-hand insight to the options careers in the horticultural sector can offer.
A focus of the initiative has been to give students an insight to the behind-the-scenes professions and technology now establishing in an industry becoming increasingly automated, digitised and high-tech.
Event organiser Renee Fritchley said students were surprised by the high-tech, cutting-edge industries in Bay of Plenty providing support to the horticultural sector and particularly kiwifruit.
Kiwifruit Growers chief executive Nikki Johnson said the sector now offers a broad spectrum of opportunities for school leavers from those who want to step straight into orchard work to those who want tertiary education.
“The opportunities include cadetships within the industry’s post-harvest processors and the opportunity to work while also obtaining a training qualification.”
Kiwifruit Growers has also been supporting an in-school initiative at Katikati College, which has integrated an industry academy in the school, including trades education and NCEA papers.
The school hopes soon to learn whether it has managed to get funding for a separate academy classroom on its campus.
A Waikato University report in 2017 predicted the kiwifruit sector will generate an extra 29,000 full-time jobs over 13 years, in addition to the 11,000 already in the sector.
It will accompany an increase in kiwifruit’s export earnings from $2.6 billion now to $6b by 2030.
The report attributed much of the sector’s strong future growth to SunGold fruit and estimated without it the growth would be only half the 2030 projection.
But Johnson said Kiwifruit Growers is doing its own work on what sort of staff numbers the sector might require in years to come, both full and part time.
“Those were very big numbers in the university report and may well be the case but we want to have more targeted data on where the needs are.”
Kiwifruit Growers has also been working with iwi to support the Kiwi Leaders programme run through Te Awanui Huka Pak, the 100% iwi-owned and operated post-harvest processor.
With intergenerational land ownership, young average age and extensive kiwifruit holdings the sector is working to address and accelerate the development of young Maori into higher levels across the sector’s value chain.
