Big ambitions for the growing business

Horticulture NZ wants the industry to keep raising the bar on sustainable growing practices. Photo / Hawke's Bay Today

The horticulture industry aims to more than double in size to become a $10 billion business by 2020, and plans to use New Zealand's clean, green image to help it get there.

Horticulture New Zealand says the industry is at a crossroads and has released a strategy for moving the sector away from growth driven by volume towards value-added products.

President Andrew Fenton says New Zealand has been seen as a world leader in best-practice growing methods, but other Southern Hemisphere nations such as South Africa and Chile - low-cost producers compared with this country - are nipping at our heels.

"Their quality is getting better and better and closer to our own.

"If we take our foot off the pedal, essentially the competition is catching up that quickly that we will go backwards."

The sector has grown significantly in the past four decades. In 1970 it accounted for just 2 per cent of agricultural exports. By 2007 that figure had risen to 15 per cent.

Now the total industry is worth $4.2 billion, split fairly evenly between the domestic and export markets.

But Fenton said producers had almost become too good at what they did, with increasing volumes depressing prices.

New Zealand needed to create more value in its produce with strategies such as investment in developing new cultivars and continuing to raise the bar on sustainable growing practices.

Horticulture New Zealand wants to tell a unified New Zealand story about our clean, green environment, developed with Tourism New Zealand.

All sorts of sectors did this bit by bit, Fenton said.

"But we actually haven't got a common theme across the top.

"Certainly in the produce industry we want to have a common branding programme."

He believed initiatives such as the kiwifruit sector's Kiwi Green programme, aimed at minimising the use of chemical sprays, were starting to add value to the fruit.

The ultimate aim was to grow produce as naturally as possible.

"We can get all the benefits of close as damn it to organic but maintain the control and quality that conventional growing methods give us."

Horticulture New Zealand also says the industry needs to co-operate better. While some sectors such as kiwifruit and avocado were well co-ordinated, others were not, Fenton said.

Huge efforts were going in to plant breeding with the aim of producing the next zespri gold kiwifruit or ENZA jazz apple, but there were limits on funding.

That could be extended by growers pooling their resources to power up the intellectual property programme.

Another part of Horticulture New Zealand's strategy is to focus on carefully chosen geographic and demographic target markets.

The industry exports to more than 120 countries but only 34 of those markets have a value of more than $1 million.

In the past 10 to 15 years there had been a shift away from the traditional market of Britain and Europe towards Asia, Fenton said.

Japan was a significant market with China increasingly so, and India was on the horizon.

"Those are markets with that niche higher income level that's going to afford our premium products."