YOUR INDUSTRY
Hauiti Berries ahead of the pack Spring gave its last, nasty gasp in the first week of November, with a storm that brought lashing rain and gusting gales to the Gisborne area. By Kristine Walsh It was rough, with days of the same to come. A state of emergency was declared, trees littered the road leading to Tolaga Bay and power poles leaned like drunkards from the land that had moved beneath them.
That wouldn't usually worry Hauiti Berries operations manager, Steve Phelps. Though delicate, his berries are under a network of tunnel houses, so the harvest is not weather dependent.
That resilience is a good indicator of how Hauiti Berries has, in just three years, grown from one hectare of cropping to four, with the resulting harvest estimated to reach nearly 45,000 kilograms this December – up from 500 kilograms in their first year of picking (2019) and double that by the end of 2022.
But this week his team were dealing with a ‘major weather event’ that had invaded even the closed-confines of the tunnel houses.
That’s even with the November flood resulting in a loss of around 4,000 kilograms. It's a big win for an organisation operating in a small East Coast region, 50 kilometres north of Gisborne and with a population of just over 800.
“We're good, but we're not God,” says Steve, referencing the 300 millimetres of water that swept through his tunnel houses. “We're just going to have to suck it up and make sure we continue to get good fruit off in the coming weeks.”
Known by the locals as Uawa-nui-a-Ruamatua – Uawa, for short – Tolaga Bay is the turangawaewae of Te Aitanga-aHauiti, an iwi within the wider reach of Ngāti Porou, that has become known for its focus on science and the arts.
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The ORCHARDIST : DECEMBER 2021
