The mis-shaped kiwifruit looked like a chook, but Chinese Professor Xu Xiaobiao plucked it up from the grading table in Whangarei yesterday.
"Kiwi ... fruit," he said, holding up the bird-like fruit and laughing along with the six other Chinese men with whom he was touring the Eastpack packhouse at Glenbervie.
The seven visitors all have leading roles in agriculture in Jiangxi province in southeast China, which is slightly bigger than the South Island and home to 43 million people.
And their visit could help New Zealand efforts to develop kiwifruit resistant to the vine-killing disease Pseudomonas syringae pv. Actinidiae (Psa), first detected in New Zealand in 2010 and now infecting orchards everywhere except in Northland.
Professor Xu lectures at the Jiangxi Agricultural University, and university vice-president Chen Jinyin is also in the delegation. Three of the others are top provincial government agricultural administrators and the others run major citrus orchards.
They arrived in New Zealand on Sunday and leave today after studying local kiwifruit and avocado production with Kamo orchardist John McIntyre and meeting scientists at Plant and Food Research in Auckland.
It's the 15th time Mr McIntyre has arranged such a visit since he set up New Zealand China Bridge Ltd in 2006 to further his interest in China and improve networking among Kiwi and Chinese agriculturalists. Mr McIntyre, 49, said the visits had started after he had been asked to look after some Chinese horticulturists for an afternoon in 2005.
"I took them home for a barbecue. They had a ball, invited me to visit them in China, and I've since been over there 15 times," he said.
China produced four times the amount of kiwifruit grown in New Zealand, all consumed domestically. "Professor Xu has started trials with semi-unknown varieties [of kiwifruit] he found in the mountains and this may help develop a Psa-resistant variety," he said. Psa has been blamed for Zespri's $7.6 million net profit after tax for 2012/13, down from $20.5 million in 2011/12.