YOUR INDUSTRY PUKEKOHE
VITAL WATER GOING OUT TO SEA Words by Geoff Lewis : Photographs by Trefor Ward ‘’In the week leading up to the lockdown we tripled our throughput. Our casual staff opted to stay home and we were meeting our full-timers daily to convince them to come to work. Most of them don’t speak English and they were scared. We provide a seven-seater van for staff transport but due to the social-distancing requirements we had to create work bubbles, redistribute our ute fleet and arrange the appropriate travel paperwork so they were classified as essential workers. It was a challenge to keep up with the protocols just to work within the law.’’ The couple were lucky in having their son Thomas return home from university only the weekend before the Covid lockdown. Their daughter Julia also returned. For the first week of lockdown the family found itself flat out doing the harvesting, sorting and packing, with only a skeleton staff in the packhouse.
Vikki and Chris Nicholson
Dealing with the Covid-19 emergency provided challenges for North Waikato and Pukekohe growers, but access to water remains a daunting and ongoing issue. Chris and Vikki Nicholson run Hinemoa Quality Producers on a gorgeous piece of rolling landscape overlooking the great westward bend in the Waikato River. Blessed with highly productive Patumahoe clay loam soil, the 200ha property, with 16ha leased adjoining, has been owned by the Nicholson family since 1945 and was diversified from sheep to cropping in the 1970s, initially growing potatoes and squash. Today onions and potatoes are grown about equally for the domestic and export markets. As Vikki explains, when Covid-19 hit there was a lot of fear and so many unknowns. The Nicholsons’ workforce is made up of a small number of local permanent employees and a group of workers from the Auckland Syrian-Christian community. Generally, this arrangement has worked well. But the speed with which the Covid emergency arrived created immediate challenges.
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NZGROWER : AUGUST 2020
Suddenly, many of the independent fruit and vege retailers who took Hinemoa’s produce were closed. Restaurants, cafés and fast food outlets closed, reducing demand from the wholesale markets which the business had supplied daily. The Nicholsons were faced with the immediate problem of where to sell a portion of their product – and this raised the question of whether or not to plant the usual volumes of onions and potatoes for the coming season, Vikki explains: ‘’Chris made the decision to plant. He figured people needed to eat. We were lucky with the weather which was kind to us and allowed us to get the ground work done.’’ On the upside there was a significant increase in the demand for potatoes and onions through the My Food Bag outlet and more people learning to cook for themselves at home – a lot more produce was being delivered to the door. ‘’It was a big learning curve. We had meetings every morning. We were visited by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and audited and checked for our protocols. It was the speed with which it all happened. There was no precursor. People just had to use their common sense. ‘’Getting hold of PPE (personal protection equipment) was difficult. Even the MPI guy hadn’t been issued with any. If we’d had one person turn up in the packhouse sick we would have had to have shut the whole operation down.’’ In the field the problems of social distancing weren’t as intense as workers were basically quarantined in their vehicles and tractors.
