Kiwifruit sector's big night out
The turmoil and challenges faced by the kiwifruit industry in the past 30 years were put to one side but not forgotten at a glitzy night for 400 kiwifruit growers and guests in Mt Maunganui recently.
NZ's kiwifruit industry’s people – such as Dave Goodwin, Tauranga – are committed to excellence.
Goodwin, a kiwifruit orchardist for 35 years, owns two orchards: a 6ha block with G3 gold kiwifruit and a small organic orchard with the traditional green Hayward variety.
In theory, Goodwin runs a conventional G3 orchard, but alongside the main vines is something you won’t see on any other orchard -- rows of kiwifruit covered in plastic, like a greenhouse. It’s part of his constant search for new ways to gain a premium from his fruit.
“This goes back to when Psa was discovered in kiwifruit in 2010. That was in Te Puke, but we knew it was likely to spread and a year later it came into Tauranga,” he tells Rural News.
“We were busy looking to see how we might control it. There were plenty of snake oil salesmen out there selling chemicals, but there was no research into how effective these were going to be. We knew Psa needed moisture for the bacteria to spread and also cold temperatures.”
Knowing that, Goodwin says, it then came down to finding ways to combat it, hence the idea of putting a plastic canopy over the kiwifruit. Erecting a large plastic canopy had its challenges, the wind being the obvious one, and he had to replace the roof five times before deciding to put hail netting over the top to make it stronger.
This is one of many innovations described by Goodwin as a learning experience.
The canopy helped, but other solutions came along and today covering kiwifruit solely to protect them from Psa is uneconomic. But Goodwin is keeping some under the plastic and is using the climatic environment there to trial new varieties of kiwifruit. The environment speeds up the growth of new vines and has produced a leafy canopy a year earlier than would happen outside. This coming year, Goodwin will see whether the vines fruit just as quickly.
“The next challenge I see is whether the plastic has a shading impact and whether there will be sufficient light getting in to get the buds to burst, to get the fruit to colour up as we get toward maturity, and to promote dry-matter in the fruit. There are elements in the fruit we don’t test as we are growing the vegetative canopy.”
But given the possibility of insufficient sunlight getting through the canopy, Goodwin is trialling another idea: spreading a white reflective cloth on the ground to ‘re-use’ some of the light coming through.
The other challenge is regulating heat in the tunnel house -- sometimes heat is required and sometimes it’s not -- and working out exactly how to regulate this. The aim is to see if vines can be ‘fast tracked’ into production.
“Getting the crop one year earlier could be financially advantageous,” Goodwin explains. “When you take a vine out of production you have no income in that year and if its two years you have no income for two years. If you are re-establishing a new variety, if we can halve that time there is a financial advantage to us.”
While Goodwin is yet to do the final sums on establishing kiwifruit under a plastic canopy, he says trials so far indicate it could be profitable.
But the trials at Goodwin’s property don’t stop there. He’s looking at options for artificially pollinating the new G3 gold variety, which has traditionally been pollinated by bees.
