Good apple harvest predicted following great start

March 10th, 2011

Market prospects for one of ours major apple varieties, royal gala, look promising as packhouses process one of the better crops of recent seasons, according to a report published this week in the Nelson Mail.

With about half the local royal gala crop picked, packhouses are reporting high packout rates. Heath Wilkins, managing director of Birdhurst, which has 200 hectares of apple varieties around Motueka, told the newspaper it was one of the best crops it had grown.

Cox's orange was all picked, and although the fruit was smaller than normal, it was of good quality. Gala size was also down slightly, but that posed no problems, Heath said. However, growers need to be organised and get their fruit off the trees in time. While it was still early days, he said Birdhurst's fixed-price contract gala was returning between $22 and $24 a carton, similar to last year.

Pipfruit NZ told the Nelson Mail a "fantastic" pacific beauty crop was earning above the $30 mark. "A lot of early fruit gets traded into Asia at fixed prices, but from this point on an increasing volume is shipped off to Europe, and the European markets are clearing quite nicely and are quite strong," a spokesman said.

Growers had further reason to be optimistic because while the kiwi dollar hadn't moved much against the United States dollar, it was more favourable against the euro and was back at the level it was at a year ago. "Things are much more positive than they were three or four weeks ago."

Heath Wilkins told the Mail about 250 staff at Birdhurst and its sister packhouse and coolstore company Golden Bay Fruit were involved in the harvest, including 100 Registered Seasonal Employers (RSE) scheme workers from Vanuatu. There had been no difficulty finding enough people to pick and pack, he said.

For more details and to read the full Nelson Mail article, click here

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