The Future of Hawke’s Bay Hort

The Wilsons' thriving apple orchard in Hawke's Bay, spanning 50 hectares with modern, productive trees, faced a devastating setback when Cyclone Gabrielle struck. The cyclone halved their orchard and output, plunging the family business into a costly recovery. Despite the destruction, they are determined to rebuild with even more advanced planting techniques. Labour challenges, widespread in the industry, have prompted a shift towards mechanisation to curb rising costs. Farmlands is bolstering support for Hawke's Bay horticulture, opening a new specialist store to enhance services and supply chains, ensuring the sector's resilience and growth.

Cyclone Setback

Starting out with 10ha and around 8,000 trees, the Wilsons had expanded their operation to 50ha across five properties by the time Cyclone Gabrielle struck last year. “We had that all developed and 20ha was relatively young plantings within the last five or six years, so they were all coming into fruition,” Craig says. “They were all producing well, they were all modern plantings and hitting their strengths pre-cyclone.”

Gabrielle affected all five of the Wilsons’ properties, causing them to lose effectively half of their trees, he says. “Now we've got 25ha of producing trees in the ground, and this year, we produced pretty much half the amount of apples that we did pre-cyclone. We went from 6,500 bins down to about 3,200 this year. And a lot of the trees destroyed were, unfortunately, newer trees, so it was a huge setback.”

In the 25ha wrecked by the storm, they cleared the silt back to the original ground layer, a huge process that involved moving over 100,000m3 of silt. Much of that land was leased out to a local grower who used it for early season squash, although the Wilsons did manage to plant 3ha of new, modern apple trees after the cyclone.

“Going forward, we're just going to do it in a staged process over the next three or four years, redeveloping back into more modern structures and more modern plantings, even more modern than what our new plantings were last time,” Craig says. While the modern plantings will earn better returns and reduce costs over time, they are expensive to set up, especially for a business that has had its income halved overnight.

“You're talking, with the structures and everything, up to $150,000 a hectare, whereas if you just plant a tree and grow it, it is considerably less than that. The long-term benefit is reducing labour requirements and getting as many hands off the trees as possible, because that's what's killing us at the moment: the labour costs.”

Common Themes

Richard Lyons, a Farmlands Technical Advisor in the Hawke’s Bay who specialises in the apple sector, says the labour issues affecting the Taylors and the Wilsons are a problem across the industry. “There's been a huge shift in growing styles that lend itself to more mechanisation in terms of pruning, in terms of picking, in terms of thinning,” he says.

“Increases in labour costs in this industry have been huge over the last three to five years so growers are finding more efficient ways to grow their fruit. A lot more growing systems are being set up and designed for ease of picking as opposed to the old standard 3D system where you had to put your ladder three times round the tree. Now it's more about just going along a line of fruit in a row, which makes it much easier to pick and get into. That's going to continue.”

Richard says there are some of the older style trees still being grown, but he believes their days are becoming limited. “As a result, they will be targeted for redevelopment as and when growers can afford to do so. But right now, a lot of the smaller guys don't necessarily have the budget to do that, so it’s the bigger guys that are doing a lot of that.”

Ideal Conditions

Hawke’s Bay is one of New Zealand’s largest horticulture regions, and Richard says it’s a very good region for growing quality apples. “We have enough winter chilling, and then we have a bit of moisture around in the spring and then a reasonably warm long summer. In general our soils are very fertile, which enables productive apple orchards.” Richard says soil and water science have also advanced in recent years, helping growers improve their returns and identify parts of their orchards that need more attention. Soil testing has been especially important during the cyclone recovery, he says.

Supporting Hort in the Bay

Chris Binns, Head of Sales and Strategy Horticulture at Farmlands, says the Hawke’s Bay is a key region for the co-operative as it signals a refreshed offering for the horticulture sector. “For Farmlands to have a national horticulture presence, we have to be a major player in the Hawke's Bay.”

Chris says the nationwide rollout of the Farmlands Horticulture brand shows a renewed focus on horticulture across the co-operative. “That really comes back to Farmlands’ policy of being the go-to for everyone connected to our land. If that's our mantra, then we've got to live and breathe it, and that means being able to be everything for horticulture as well.

“Horticulture is not just a box to tick; it's one of the major pieces of New Zealand's primary industries, so we have to give it renewed support and offer a high level of service nationwide. We do horticulture very well in Bay of Plenty, and we are having some real growth in places like Northland, but we need to make sure that we are investing in capability right across the country, and Hawke's Bay is the next big piece of that puzzle.”

To support horticulture in Hawke’s Bay, Farmlands is opening a new specialist horticulture store in Hastings, which Chris says will serve several important functions. “Our growers will be able to come in, they'll be able to see somebody there. It will be a base for our Technical Advisers, and our supply chain will be smoother as it will also be a Distribution Centre for agrichemical and for horticulture. You will still be able to come and pick stuff up, which will be perfect. It will have a sales operation, so it will be a little bit different to a standard distribution centre.”

Chris says with the horticulture sector becoming increasingly sophisticated and tech-focused, Farmlands needs to ensure it has an offering fit for the modern-day grower, and this ties in with not only the FarmlandsPRO app but the new regional hub system the co-operative is implementing in its supply chain to improve efficiency. “There's a combination of so many things: not only their technology changing on the farm, but for us it's about how we best get their needs to them in the most cost-effective way.

“Part of that is operating better from within a hort hub, a regional hub like this, and having our transport and supply chain capabilities in the right place, whether that be from supplier to us to grower, or supplier direct to grower, or offshore to our regional hubs. The one bit that doesn't change is our shareholders’ reliance on the technical ability of our people. That will always remain there.”