Tasman faces challenge to get stellar apple crop harvested

Erica and Bill Lynch could not have harvested their crop without RSE workers

Tasman has a stellar apple crop of well coloured, good-sized fruit to harvest this season and the challenge will be getting it off the trees and onto ships.

Anne Hardie

Redwood Valley orchardists, Bill and Erica Lynch, say the region had a challenging start to the season with continually wet weather and they were spraying every five days to keep disease at bay. Then the weather cleared and they have had great growing conditions through to harvest, that produced good-sized fruit and plenty of it.

“We’ve got the size and colour and normally you don’t get that together,” Erica says. By early autumn the region was getting a big temperature gap between night and day with no wind, providing perfect conditions for harvest. The Lynches have a small family orchard of just 40ha and heading into their harvest they were scrambling for workers to pick the fruit. In the past they have usually had about 15 overseas backpackers with Working Holiday Visas, plus a handful of Kiwis. Most years they can borrow occasional staff from other orchards as different apple varieties allow, but this year everyone is short of pickers. Advertising through all the usual channels including Backpacker Board, PickNZ and roadside signage attracted only the equivalent 2.5 Kiwi workers. That was despite lifting bin rates considerably for pickers so that a reasonable Kiwi picker can now earn about $40 per hour (on average) and the Lynches also offer low-cost accommodation nearby. At the same time, they were desperately trying to secure Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme workers after being turned down the previous two years, and they say that is one of the challenges for small orchards. This year they were again declined but Immigration New Zealand told them they could share RSE workers

with growers in Marlborough. That left them a bit stunned as Marlborough is two hours away and RSE workers would be busy with grapes at the same time as the apple harvest in Tasman.

As the harvest loomed, they were tense and desperate, wondering how they were going to pick their crop. At the last minute they were finally allocated ten RSE workers from Vanuatu who arrived in time for the beginning of harvest. On the hiked bin rates, the RSE workers can earn $250 a day for an eight-hour day. They are still short of the usual 20 pickers they need for the middle of the harvest, and Bill says they will have to change their harvest plans so they can strategically pick varieties to counter staff shortages. That may mean leaving second picks on the trees. “There’s a big crop coming mid-season and it depends whether we can afford to go back to a second pick with varieties like Jazz, Envy and Fuji. We may pick more on that first pick.” He says harvest will be a challenge across the region because of staffing shortages and it is causing “a lot of simmering anxiety.” The threat of Covid-19 in orchards and packhouses accentuates staffing shortages and he says the crop then faces shipping issues similar to last year. Between Covid-19 and shipping delays, he worries about the region’s storage capabilities for the crop if packhouses have staffing issues and can’t get the fruit onto ships quickly enough. To add to this year’s woes, there is the uncertainty about the Class 2 fruit heading to Russia which in mid-March was looking unlikely. Bill says Russia does not take big volumes, but the market has provided reasonable returns for fruit that is otherwise juiced or of no value at all. It all comes at a time when growers’ costs are escalating faster than ever including fuel, chemicals, labour and packing. Now they have the perfect crop on the trees and they just need to get them picked, packed and shipped.