YOUR INDUSTRY
Going Bananas I recently spent a few days in Northland visiting tropical fruitgrowers. Bananas have been grown in the top half of the North Island for many years, but mainly as the occasional plant situated in a sheltered site or close to a north-facing wall. Bananas are a tropical fruit and require warm conditions if they are to thrive. For this reason, almost all of the bananas consumed in New Zealand are imported from tropical countries (mainly the Philippines and Ecuador), where labour is cheap, and the climate is suitable. By Mike Nichols
Our neighbour, Australia, grows its own bananas (mainly at Coff’s Harbour and in North Queensland), and has overcome the problem of being a high wages country by prohibiting imports. Thus, the retail price of bananas in New Zealand tends to be about half of the Australian domestic price. In Turkey there is a rapidly increasing banana growing industry (8,000 ha) using plastic-clad greenhouses near Mersin, which has a similar latitude to Northland, but this is protected by a 100% tariff on imported bananas. The Spanish Canary Islands (which I visited in 2019) exports only to continental Spain, which (although part of the European Union) restricts the cheaper central American grown bananas into Spain. So, what future does banana production have in New Zealand? I consider that the prospects are good, provided that we prevent any of the serious banana diseases (such as Panama disease) from entering the country, by ensuring that our plant quarantine is effective in preventing the import of any plant material (except for fruit). Such as unofficially bringing in banana suckers from the Pacific islands. The only fresh plant material must be in tissue culture, and then placed into biosecurity until confirmed as being free from any potential pathogens. The second requirement is to determine how best to grow the crop under New Zealand conditions. New Zealand is not the humid tropics – anything but, however it could still be economic and profitable to produce tropical fruits in a sub-tropical part of the country. We need to develop our own unique production systems. In fact, a study of the literature demonstrates just how little we know about how bananas grow, and the factors which 58
The ORCHARDIST : MARCH 2021
Greenhouse bananas at Mathew Bergersen’s property, Te Puna
influence productivity. Because bananas grow so easily in the tropics, the research about them is very limited. When we then try to interpret this into a sub-tropical environment it becomes even more difficult. Bananas are an interesting crop in that they are propagated vegetatively, either by taking suckers (with a few roots attached) from the base of existing plants, or by tissue culture (which is now the more favoured method). They are best described as day-neutral plants in terms of flowering meaning that day length does not influence when they flower, unlike short-day plants such as chrysanthemums or hops, which only flower when the day length falls below 12 hours, or long-day plants like onions, which only form bulbs under long days. This does not, however mean that they necessarily always flower after a certain time, as temperature and other climatic factors will also influence flowering time. At the base of the banana plant is a corm like structure from which shoots develop, and one of these will become the main shoot. All the leaves and flowers are developed at the base of this shoot, and grow up within the pseudo stem – which is really the base of the earlier leaves. Depending on temperature, the banana produces about one leaf ev ery month, and flowers after it has about 40 leaves; however, at any one time it probably only has some 8 to 10 leaves, as the older leaves die and are damaged by the wind. It appears that floral initiation may well be critical in New Zealand as the majority of fruit I have seen tends to be short, and the bunches may require thinning to increase fruit size. Temperature during the flower initiation phase appears (from the literature) to be critical. As the majority of New Zealand production appears to have
