Hawkes Bay Hort Goes Hi-Tech

The Kiwi horticulture sector is going hi-tech, using 21st-century solutions for challenges like labour shortages and a changing climate. We speak to Hawke’s Bay apple growers embracing change, and learn what Farmlands is doing to support the fast-evolving sector.

If you were to bring early 20th century Hawke’s Bay apple grower Walter Taylor forward 100 years in a time machine to 2024, the family orchard of today would be almost unrecognisable. Now run by Walter’s grandson Kelvin Taylor, Taylor Corporation has about 450ha of apple orchards, and everything from the varieties being grown to the spacing of the trees is vastly different to when the Taylor family began growing in the area more than a century ago.

The biggest difference, however, is not out in the orchard but inside the brand-new packhouse, which has been completely rebuilt since being devastated by Cyclone Gabrielle last year. “One season we redid our packhouse with robotics; the forklifts in the shed don't have drivers or anything like that, and we do stacking with robots, boxing the apples, and putting the apples on the trays,” Kelvin says.

“We had a really modern packhouse, as modern as anyone in the world, before the cyclone, so what we've done since is just basically put the same stuff back in again.” Steve Anderson, the Operations Manager for the orchard, says water levels during the cyclone varied from a metre deep in some areas to swallowing trees five metres high in others.

“It went through Kelvin's house, Cameron's house [Kelvin’s son], all of our packhouse, all of our coolstores. And we also lost orchards in the Fernhill area where the stopbanks broke.” The coolstores were filled up with water, and there were bins of newly harvested fruit floating down the road, Steve says.

“Kelvin made the decision to replace the packhouse, which most people said would never happen in one year, but they've had an amazing group of contractors that did the first installation who all came back - and a few extras - and got it all up and running. The plan is to get the coolstores fully done in the next two years because we couldn't do the whole lot in one season.”

Despite the disaster that struck last year, Kelvin says conditions in the area are generally very favourable for apple growing. The family shifted their orchard a few kilometres north to its current location in the 1960s, and he says one of the biggest benefits of the move is lower risk of frost. “It's a lot warmer on the northern side of Hastings, and that's why we basically got changed from the Hastings area to the Napier area.” 

However, Steve says climate conditions have become more unpredictable the past few years. “The changing weather patterns have been something that's of consideration because in the last five years we're getting more rainfall than we used to get, so there's been different pressures on black spot and that sort of thing, for pest control, for disease control.”

Labour Headaches

The biggest challenge Taylor Corporation is dealing with is one shared by many in the rural sector: the cost and availability of labour, especially post-Covid. “We’re busy from mid November right through until mid-May, firstly, with thinning and then following on with harvest from February,” Steve says.

“But we are trying to reduce our winter numbers of staff by mechanical pruning because it's so expensive now with the cost of labour going up all the time. That's why we're moving to mechanisation. We've been doing mechanical pruning since 2017, and now we're playing around with mechanical thinning as well.”

To reduce costs, they have also been changing the way the orchards are laid out, bringing the trees closer together but also reducing their height, using 2.7m poles rather than 5m. “If you're keeping it low to the ground, you can get better light penetration, but it's also about staff,” Steve explains.

“Staff don't like climbing ladders, so if you can keep things quite close to the ground, it's cheaper to harvest, it's cheaper to prune, it's cheaper to do everything with it. It's easier to get staff to work on it. You can get mums who come in and do part of the day while the kids are at school, or you can bring in guys from the islands or locals that have never done it before.

“It's quite simple, whereas, if you're climbing ladders with a picking bag and pruning saws and things, it's a lot harder.” The cost of the materials is also a factor, he says. “When you're getting 5m poles and you're putting a pole in every eight or 10 trees down a row, it's very expensive.”

Emerging Markets  

Another thing that has changed for Hawke’s Bay apple growers in the past few years is who is buying their fruit. Craig Wilson, owner of the Dartmoor Valley-based Meiros Orchard, started the business over 30 years ago with his wife Gill. “Back then half the orchard was Braeburn, with a lot of Royal Galas and a few Fuji. A lot of it was Europe-bound back in those early years. Now it's all Asia based, so it tends to be sweet and red and big.”

Craig and Gill are shareholders in the local Mt Erin packhouse, and he says they try and stick to apples that they can pack and market themselves. “Dazzle is the only one that we haven't got the marketing rights to; we grow varieties like Jugala, and we market them as Gem. We grow high-grade Fuji, lots of Queen that we can market ourselves, and Galaxy.”

Although he is a first-generation orchard owner, Craig has a long history in the sector, having originally done a three-year horticultural cadetship out of school. “I went overseas after that and worked and ended up managing a poultry farm in England for six years with my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife. We saved some money and bought our first block of land in 1993.”

He says working on the poultry farm taught them useful skills they have applied in their orchard business, although the day-to-day reality was quite different to the seasonal-focused horticulture sector. “To state the obvious, we were dealing with livestock, which needed feeding and watering every day,” Craig says.

“It was an egg business, so the eggs were picked up every day, graded every day. Mervyn, my wife's father, developed an egg run, so we had our own customers that we used to deliver to as well. We had 10,000 laying hens and we produced about 8,000 eggs a day and sold them as well.”

As a young Kiwi on his OE, Craig admits he needed discipline to avoid the temptation to party and splurge. “I was a young fellow and all my peers were coming over to Europe and going out always and trying to talk me into it, and here we were trying to save money and we did. Our aim was always to come back to New Zealand to buy some land and develop an orchard.”