Red, green or gold, harvest begins

Sachin Kumar (left), Piki Rakau and Iehu Munro picking at Kaiaponi yesterday morning. Picture by Paul Rickard

Growers were optimistic about the quality of the district’s kiwifruit crop as the annual harvest got under way on Tuesday.

The first shipment is scheduled leave for overseas markets.

Seeka Limited has kicked off its harvest with the first SunGold kiwifruit in New Zealand cleared for harvest being grown in Gisborne.

The company has 12 packing operations around the country, and will begin packing the SunGold kiwifruit at their packhouse in Lytton Road later this week.

The first shipment — in conjunction with Zespri, TKL and ISO — is scheduled for loadout through Eastland Port over the weekend.

“We have plenty of capacity across Seeka’s packhouses, and to be able to handle our supplying growers, packing fruit right here in Gisborne is a great advantage,” client relationships manager Peter Johnston said.

“That, along with being able to ship it out of the Eastland Port means that we can deliver timely harvest and packing, with efficient loadout to market for our growers.”

Rochelle Brown, also a Seeka client relationships manager, said a number of their growers were affected by weather events over the last two years, with some losing parts of their orchards due to water stress and having to deal with reduced crops for 2024.

“We understand the local challenges, and work closely with our growers to get the best outcome possible,” she said.

“We are ready to go for the 2024 harvest.  Our team and operation are local, supporting local employment and businesses, which is something we really value.”

Seeka Gisborne operates year round packing gold, green and red kiwifruit, citrus — including oranges, lemons and mandarins — and persimmons.

Their Gisborne facility, which has state-of-the-art automation in operation, also needs to hire 160 staff each season to help run its operations.

Gisborne regional manager Kevin Gordon said while they were getting close to filling their required numbers, they were always looking for new people to join the team.

NZ Kiwifruit Growers regional  representative Tim Tietjen started his harvest with the Red kiwifruit variety on Tuesday.

“The reds are looking pretty good,” he said.

“It’s a first-year crop, and we’re expecting to pack out around 2000 trays per hectare, with full production expected to be around 8000-10,000 trays per hectare, packed locally at Seeka Gisborne.”

Kaiaponi Farms orchard manager Alan Knight said the quality of their SunGold variety was looking good overall, too.

“We’ve had our challenges with the wet season, and that has compromised our fruit in some areas, but overall it looks like maturity is racing along.

“I would say for us at Kaiaponi Farms we will get a large proportion of our SunGold into the Kiwistart premium export market,” Mr Knight said.

Mr Tietjen said he felt local growers could look forward to getting a lot of fruit into the premium export programme.

“In general terms, I think we will see a reasonable harvest in the district this year, despite the weather challenges.”