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2018
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Hawke’s Bay
Lesley Wilson will be retiring from the position of President of the Hawke’s Bay Fruitgrowers’ Association at the end of the month..
It’s been a busy year for fruitgrowers
T
o Promote, Foster and Protect fruitgrowing in Hawke’s Bay, that is the Hawke’s Bay Fruitgrowers’ Association stated aim and it has been a very busy year doing just this. The National Horticultural Field Day, that the HBFA started, has gone from strength to strength. This year saw record attendance by both visitors and exhibitors and this alongside the seminar series sees these field days as an important part of the horticultural calendar. The Association also hosts their Hawke’s Bay Young Fruitgrower of the Year competition at the Hort Field Days. It is a pleasure to showcase our young people throughout the day. To compete in this competition they must have at least 3 yearsexperience in fruitgrowing, be completing or have completed their apprenticeship and be under 30. This year we had a record 15 people apply to compete and we had to whittle that down to eight. Ultimately it was Lisa Arnold of Bostock’s NZ that went on to represent Hawke’s Bay at the National Young Grower Competition. Lisa was the first woman, and first organic grower to take out the Hawke’s Bay Young Fruitgrower competition. We were also thrilled that the National Young Grower competition was held here in Hawke’s Bay.
We lobbied hard to get it here and the gala dinner was a sellout event. Lisa Arnold was runner-up at this event-she represented Hawke’s Bay proudly and showed everyone that horticulture is thriving in Hawke’s Bay. Our apprentices are our future, this year we have over 150 young people undertaking apprenticeship training and I would like to thank their employers for the effort that goes into their on the job training. Off-site training is hosted either by the EIT or Primary ITO and we work hard with both these organisations to make sure that the education programme is fit for purpose in this rapidly evolving industry. The Association has been kept very busy representing fruitgrowers’ interests at TANK, the Water Conservation Order and council hearings for a change in land use of Plains Zoned land. The TANK consultation process recently concluded with a draft plan change being put together. In many ways the process is just starting and it is very much a ‘watch this space’ item as the community grapples with how we should protect our water resource in this new environment of water shortages and contamination. It was an honour to be part of the process and though we didn’t win all the debates, I will continue to use the lessons learned in everyday management of my own property. The Water Conservation Order is becoming a drawn out process. It is our view that it should never have gone forward as we had the TANK process that covered off everything the WCO
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wanted. However, the process has started and it has to be seen to the end. It’s very time consuming and, we believe, totally unnecessary. That a special interest group chose to try to over-ride the views of the community is disturbing. Our Executive Officer is kept very busy fighting Plan Changes. The versatile soils of the Heretaunga Plains need to be protected from further development. Hawke’s Bay has the Heretaunga Plains Urban Development Strategy in place to help with this but it is challenged at every turn. At present it’s the development of retirement villages that is potentially taking up food producing soil. Once this soil is under houses it is lost forever. Many years ago my family grew vegetables in what is now Tait Drive in Napier, hardly anyone remembers that this soil used to produce food for our region. The loss of good horticultural soil, little-by-little, is dangerous not only for our region, in term of job creation, but also for New Zealand, in terms of food production. Headline after headline decries the cost of food but when it is a) in limited supply because of land loss and b) destroyed by storms, is it little wonder that the supply and demand model has swung away from the consumer. Food security is rapidly becoming a topic for debate in New Zealand, we need to do everything we can to turn the tables. At the end of the month I will be retiring from the position of President of the Hawke’s Bay Fruitgrowers’ Association. It has been an honour to represent, and fight for, the fruitgrowers of Hawke’s Bay. Lesley Wilson Executive Officer Hawke’s Bay Fruitgrowers
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Lisa Arnold competes at the Young Grower of the Year National Final held in Napier last month.
Early morning start for the eight competitors in the Hawke’s Bay Young Fruitgrower competition, from left Tom Dalziel, Ryan Gittings, Lincoln Thomson, Luke Scragg, Wade Miller Lisa Arnold, Anthony Taueki, Philip Siagia.
Mr Apple NZ is the largest vertically integrated apple grower, packer and exporter in New Zealand and employ 380 permanent staff and over 2000 in the peak season. There are a wide variety of seasonal employment opportunities available in the Napier, Hastings and Central Hawkes Bay areas. We also offer horticulture apprenticeships and are currently taking applications for next year’s intake. Orchard work: Available from November to January. Work includes apple thinning, orchard QC’s, tractor drivers and supervisors. Packhouse & Coolstore work: Available from February to July (day and night shift available). Work includes packers, forklift operators, supervisors, administrators, computer operators. If you are motivated to work hard and want to be part of a growing company then please email your CV along with a description of the work you are ideally seeking to: mei-ana.ave@mrapple.com If you would like to apply for a horticulture apprenticeship, please email: linda.williams@mrapple.com
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Workers ‘fit for purpose’
Hawke’s Bay
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hane Flynn is the Assistant Operations Manager, Orchard Division for FreshMax in Hawke’s Bay. He oversees 33 orchards, 75 permanent staff and up to 600 during the peak of the picking and thinning seasons. Seven years ago, he was a graduate of EIT’s Level 4 Advanced Apprenticeship in Horticulture. He is a firm believer that EIT provides the horticulture industry with workers who are “fit for purpose”. Many of Shane’s horticulture team have or are currently studying in EIT courses. “EIT has been very good at developing and tailoring courses that fit with what we need for our permanent workforce. “Our industry needs a specific set of skills and whether it’s students studying part time for diplomas or for more handson skills, EIT has responded,” says Shane. “We have been able to tailormake programmes for our staff from the unit modules on offer; tractor driving, working with chainsaws or more recently, working effectively with Extenday machinery are just some.
“The range of educational programmes is fitted to Hawke’s Bay and for our industry. It’s exactly what’s needed.” Over 100 students pass through EIT’s horticulture school each year. On offer are preemployment to Level 5 Diplomas in Agribusiness Management and in Horticulture Production. At levels 2, 3 and 4 are short courses for a specific skill and longer certificates that are full time or run part time or blended online to provide flexibility to fit around employment. There’s the opportunity to learn about soil processes, plant science, propagation, pest and disease management, irrigation and harvesting to become a well-informed grower. Graduates gain understanding of horticultural technology, resource management and agribusiness that help them become successful managers. The two strands of the New Zealand Diploma in Horticulture see EIT working in partnership with Primary ITO, and in one instance NZ Apples and Pears, to deliver the qualifications. “We are proud of our strong relationships with the industry, both locally and nationally,” says Gordon Reid, EIT Horticulture Tutor, Primary Industries. “Our aim is to provide practical programmes underpinned by theory that meet the needs of our growing industry. We strive to listen to industry so our students are ready for work and have the ability for a successful career.”
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Hawke’s Bay Vintage Report
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friendly, frost-free Spring to the 2017/2018 growing season was a harbinger of good things to come. A warm and relatively dry, early summer lead to a very hot January and February with memories and comparisons harking back to the extremely warm 2009 and 2014 vintages. It is interesting to note that the indicators of a warm season (mean air temperatures) both maximum and minimum, were higher in 2018 than both other seasons. Hawke’s Bay’s Grower Degree Days (GDD) were at record level highs, 16% over the longterm average. In early March Hawke’s Bay received one significant rain event (100+mm of rain) that caused much-publicised local flooding in the Esk Valley. Disappointingly the associated flooding of river deltas and vineyards in the area were perceived as a calling card of the vintage. Rain events are far from unusual in the Hawkes Bay and with excellent forecasting now available, most growers and winemakers know how to react before, during and after such an event. Much of the region’s early Chardonnay was picked before the rain and in absolute mint condition. The next 3 weeks weather proved to be the largest
challenge of the vintage; rainfall was moderate to low, however, the humidity over this period was high. With such a warm, early season, early ripening sites and varieties came under a massive amount of pressure. As is often the case in these early seasons, the key is to be able to hold off from harvesting the later ripening varieties, aiming to get through to early April when both the temperatures and humidity significantly drops. This was the case in 2018, the settled weather from early April resulted in some exceptional red wines, particularly the Cabernet family and Syrah. Warren Gibson, Chief Winemaker from Trinity Hill said “I can honestly say I have not seen a collection of young red wines as strong as in 2018. Syrah is spicy, powerful and hugely aromatic through all tiers. The Cabernet family is as strong as any vintage I can recall going back to 2009. Chardonnay is as good as ever and continues to be the go-to white variety for Hawke’s Bay. Every producer will have their own individual take on 2018. Mine is incredibly strong” In short, lovers of Hawke’s Bay wines can relax in the knowledge that many great wines will be produced from the 2018 vintage. This report was compiled with data supplied by Warren Gibson and Tony Bish
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JAZZ™ chases top spot
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awke’s Bay-grown JAZZ™ has moved up from number five to the number four top selling apple spot in the UK thanks to the care shown by local fruit growers. JAZZ™, popular for its crunchy texture and refreshing taste, is shipped around April each year by T&G Global from orchards in the Bay to the shelves of all major supermarkets in the UK and an increasing number in the USA and Asia. And it’s not just the sales ladder JAZZ™ has been climbing, it’s also ratings thanks to primetime UK quiz programme The Chase on ITV. The quiz show, with an audience of 3.5 million, recently featured a question involving JAZZ™ apples. A contestant correctly picked the answer about the apple brand against ‘The Chaser’, in this instance, ‘The Beast’. The episode will also air here in New Zealand on TV One enabling Kiwi viewers to test their apple knowledge. Another option for apple fans to test their knowledge is with
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Heaven is a V.I.P bed for a Very Hawke’s Bay Important Pet
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or almost 28 years dogs throughout New Zealand have enjoyed the comfort and benefits of Barbie Cassidy’s Beds for Very Important Pets. The former vet nurse and Labrador breeder from Waipukurau was given two bags of knopped wool back in 1991 and it wasn’t long before Barbie had come up with the idea of using the wool in dog
beds. She believed the beds would be especially therapeutic for dogs suffering from arthritis. The popularity of the beds grew steadily and Barbie added to the range by making beds for farm dogs too. Now there’s a range of three beds to give comfort and therapeutic benefit to every breed of dog. V.I.P Beds and Mutt Mattresses are made for dogs kept inside. The V.I.P beds are circular with a base and walls whereas the Tough Stuff sacks are made for working dogs and other dogs in outside situations and do not have sides. The Tough Sacks are square or oblong, and are made from grain sacks and can be personalised with the dog’s name for no extra charge. Barbie personally selects the wool for each bed and is very strict on quality control using only the best of the small balls of wool (knopped wool) to loosely pack the calico inner. Loose packing allows the wool to move and massage the dog’s joints. The beds are strongly constructed and Barbie likes to think they will outlive at least one dog. Treasured pets and working dogs all enjoy and benefit from their beautiful soft and warm wool filled beds. Farmers and vets say the V.I.P beds help in freeing up stiff dogs and generally lengthen the working life of farm dogs. Barbie also makes small and large pillows for people that are filled with merino cross wool and knopped into small balls to massage your head and neck as you rest.
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Increasing profits by reducing variability and guess work in the field By Chrys Ayley
I
The first steps, taking microwave radar measurements of grape bunches occluded by leaves..
t may sound far-fetched but in the next three to five years we’re likely to see robots, automation or artificial intelligence, working with fruit and grape growers. Group Manager, Precision Agriculture at Lincoln Agritech Ltd. Armin Werner and his team are working on a number of projects, at the request of both fruit growers and winegrowers in NZ to develop hightech solutions - as prototypes, to assist with jobs such as pruning, crop load management and grape yield ‘scanners’. With their feet very much on the ground scientists at Lincoln Agritech, along with investment from public and industry, work closely with growers to research major issues in fruit production and come up with practical solutions.
All growers want to produce a certain range of product quality-size, colour and taste but when you grow an apple much depends on where they’re located and how many are competing for space in a tree. Lincoln Agritech in partnership with NZ Apples & Pears is working on a three-year MPI Sustainable Farming Fund (SFF) programme which is researching the provision of technical support to aid decisions on where, when and what to thin to match fruit numbers of what the tree can bear photosynthetically to give the correct size of fruit. The request was to help orchard staff work more consistently, Armin says. To meet the demands of the market crop load management requires a certain planning process which involves counting buds and flowers to understand and then thin fruit numbers. Experienced growers do this manually with their staff but it’s a time consuming, yet necessary step, in managing crops. It’s the same with grapes as work needs to be checked to see if it met expectations. Each person has a different thinning ‘fingerprint’. If you had the same tree and two different people thinning they would end up with different quality and different
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sized apples. Thinning can be haphazard as estimating the number of fruit to be thinned can be time consuming, and at best it’s only an average. Automation in fruit counting will help considerably by taking an image with a camera based system which counts the apples and the supervisor can then say with confidence to reduce the crop by x amount for each tree individually. In a few years artificial intelligence will help identify the best point to cut a branch in winter pruning. The pruner makes a decision based on knowledge or alternatively receives a suggestion from a pointing device showing the best place to cut. This could also be done through augmented reality, which isn’t full automation but is a first step. Funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) Endeavour Fund, and co-funded by NZ Winegrowers, Lincoln Agritech is leading a five-year programme to develop a Grape Yield Analyser. Other industry collaborators include Plant & Food Research, Lincoln University, University of Canterbury, CSIRO and local winegrowers. Grape growers try to avoid too high yields as they don’t want to produce more wine than the market requires. NZ has a challenge in that Sauvignon Blanc is grown differently to other countries, the canes are manually pruned to a certain target number of buds resulting later in high variability of grape bunch numbers per vine. In mid-January growers start counting grape bunches to assess the
yield. This is a time consuming process which involves removing leaves and sampling many segments of rows. There are risks as the whole block cannot be sampled. The assumption is that it will be a normal yield but there’s always a risk if the growers don’t have a good dataset, Armin says. The solution being researched is a grape yield scanner to capture grapes bunches in the canopy. The machine has two sensors, a camera and a (microwave) radar. Low energy microwaves can penetrate through leaves to count occluded grape bunches. This allows many more samples than if you were to hand-count bunches of grapes. In three-years there will be a prototype, later commercialisation, and finally the product will be launched to growers. When asked about what we might see in the future Armin believes we shall see mechanical harvesting of apples here within three-years in NZ while automating pruning will take longer. Australia will probably be one of the first to use robot tractors on arable fields. And what might another decade or 15 years bring? Possibly 3D printing of apples but that’s a totally different discussion.
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A Lincoln Agritech researche er studies the crop load of apple fruitlets on an apple tree.
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Feijoas are virtually unknown to the rest of the world..
Fantastic feijoas By Chrys Ayley
J
ust a short drive from Havelock North village is what some might consider a paradise on earth. It’s here that Heather Smith, originally from the USA, has lived and worked for several decades. She works with Andrew Martin the other coowner of Tauroa, a certified organic farm and Nick Radley who has been the farm manager for 22 years. Te Mata Peak provides the perfect backdrop to Tauroa, a 680 acre farm dedicated to organic and sustainable farming, habitat restoration and education. In addition to the glorious outlook and situation the farm is home to much bird life such as kingfishers, fantails and tui who reside happily alongside feral turkeys, free range chickens, sheep and cattle. Numerous arable crops and plants are grown. Oats, barley, wheat and linseed have been grown for human consumption and chicken feed. The straw is used for mulch materials for trees and the vegetable garden as part of the system on the farm. “We have been farming Tauroa biodynamically since 1997 and have been certified BioGro for over 15 years,” Heather says. Biodynamics is a
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management strategy initiated by Rudolf Steiner in the 1930’s. Heather’s Feijoas is a relatively new venture that is achieving considerable success following Heather planting feijoa trees, some 2000 of them, about 12 years ago. It was something of an experiment with a fruit that isn’t very well known beyond New Zealand. Why feijoas? “Because they are a fruit like no other, with amazing flavor, they retain their integrity during processing, and are virtually unknown to the rest of the world.” The climate here suits feijoas, originally a fruit from South America, they enjoy the newer soils and sun and until recently there were very few insect pests. They too are farmed biodynamically and Heather’s orchard is certified organic, as are her feijoa products. Last year 55 tonnes of feijoas were harvested and were used in a variety of Heather’s Feijoas branded organic products. They are processed by certified processors in Hastings and Whakatu. Heather also supplies Simply Squeezed and several other juicing companies. Sadly the government has “cracked down” on the use of WOOFERS. “It was a gorgeous exchange of learning and productivity. So where I used to use WOOFERS with mulching, weeding and pruning, I no longer do. I hire a crew at harvest time.” Heather’s Feijoas products are suitable for use in the food industry and in the home kitchen. It’s possible to create everything from juices, smoothies, yogurt, pies, crumbles, jams, chutneys and ice cream to delicious alcoholic beverages and cocktails.
Heather’s products include Freeze Dried Feijoa Wedges with the skin on, which are great for a nutritious snack; Free Flow Frozen Feijoas, Feijoa Puree and Freeze Dried Feijoa Powder. The powder, originally made as a food ingredient, is popular as an addition to smoothies. Feijoa Jelly is a product only sold at the Hawke’s Bay Farmers Market which is lovely on seeded toast and contains less sugar than jam. Heather supplies the feijoas but the manufacture is contracted out. Finally there’s a Feijoa Essence, a refreshing, light spray, used in cosmetics and as a facial toner. Heather distils the essence on site at Tauroa. “We have two distributors, Chantal and Focus in Napier and we have social media and outreach via the Hawke’s Bay Farmers Market in Hastings.” The feijoa products are sold at Chantal Organics, Cornucopia Organics and other natural food stores such as Farro Fresh and Huckleberry Farms in Mount Eden and Parnell. Heather has a BS in Biology from University of Vermont in USA and closely follows research on food that is grown organically. “Despite the lack of acknowledgement by official authorities, scientific research continues to find that food grown organically has higher vitamin, mineral and overall nutrient content without the toxic residues of conventional food,” she says. “In addition research shows that biodynamically farmed soil increases diversity, function and depth of soil so it actually sequesters carbon.” “We have a big Italian irrigation system that we only use when really dry. I feel the fruit are sweeter
if not watered too much. Heavy mulching is also instrumental for water conservation.” “Heather’s Feijoas is still young and when a company is in the midst of branding, product development, research and development there is a bit of investment before a company is profitable. We have has such great comments and people seem to enjoy the product so we shall see what the future brings!”
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Heather Smith first planted feijoa trees 12 years ago.
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INTRODUCING THE NORWOOD FARM MACHINERY CENTRE, HASTINGS TEAM “Norwood Farm Machinery Centre” is celebrating its 70 year anniversary this year. There has been a few changes to the staff here in Hastings since I started in 2004 , so I thought it was timely to introduce some of the new faces in our business and some not so new. We have specialists in all areas of our business, parts , sales and service - covering all industries and professions from Farming , Contracting, Horticulture , Viticulture through to Lifestyle etc. With worldwide renown Brands we are 100% confident we will have a solution for you. We currently have branches in Hastings and Gisborne , our goal is use our expertise to further increase the profitability of your business.
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Nathan Beadle
Parts Manager
Field Service Technician
Small Engines Technician
Matt Lyndon
Sales Representative
Parts Technician
Myles Johnstone Service Manager
Leanne Wilkins
Field Service Technician
Service Technician
Grant Blackberry
Sales Representative
Service Administrator
Dave Fewster
Service Technician
Guy Glasgow
Service Apprentice
Finn Casey
Sales Representative
CONTACT YOUR LOCAL EQUIPMENT SPECIALISTS TO STAY AT THE FRONT OF THE PACK!
HASTINGS | 1199 Omahu Road | Ph: 06 876 7034 | www.norwood.co.nz/hastings