YOUR INDUSTRY
BEING SMARTER ABOUT THE WAY WE GROW Words by Andrew Bristol
Kylie Faulkner (middle) with Brittany McCloy (left) and James Kuperus (right), both from Onions NZ
Kylie Faulkner – Sutherland Produce Ltd sales manager and Pukekohe Vegetable Growers Association president – was born to vegetable growing. “I have vivid memories as a child being put in an onion bin during harvest as my parents did not want me to get run over in the packhouse. The bin was my playpen.” Kylie has been back in the family business for 12 years and says that every time she’s out in the paddock, she learns something about growing. “You have to be continually learning and changing to be successful in growing. We’ve specialised in lettuce, broccoli and silverbeet for the past 25 years, because we wanted to do a really good job of it and those crops rotate well. “We’ve also developed relationships with other growers in the area who are of like mind, in terms of environmental outcomes, looking after the land and food safety. We do land swaps with them so we can rotate crops and look after the soil, ensuring that the best nutrients are retained and pests and diseases are kept out. “We also grow barley and oats. We just hoe those crops back in to improve soil health.” Kylie says as growers, they all want to be still growing on these farms in 100 years plus. 34
NZGROWER : APRIL 2021
“At the end of the day, the soil is the stuff that we make our money from. It is what we grow our product in. You can’t have it ending up on the road.” This is a reference to a big flood in the mid-90s when soil ended up in the main street of Pukekohe. That major storm resulted in the Franklin Sustainability Project, which won environmental awards, particularly for silt traps. “What has worked for us in Pukekohe has been shared and adapted for use around the country. Today, growers are a lot better about sharing knowledge and experience because collectively, we all want to do the best for the land and environment.”
...they all want to be still growing on these farms in 100 years plus Kylie says that as a grower, “you never put all your eggs in one basket.” “You never grow all of one variety at a time and never grow everything on the one farm either. We have properties to the north in Ramarama, in the Bombay Hills and Pukekohe East, and one in the Waikato. We also lease a property at Karaka and, apart from that farm, all our properties are within 7km of the main farm in Bombay, where our packhouse is.
