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NZKGI chief executive Colin Bond says growers who've lived on orchards for decades had never seen anything like the storm that hit the upper North Island in late January.
For kiwifruit growers in parts of the upper North Island it was a case of watching small streams suddenly becoming raging rivers, with water rising two or three metres high and engulfing entire orchards.
NZKGI chief executive Colin Bond says growers who’ve lived on their orchards for decades told him they have never seen anything like this before. He told Rural News the recent heavy downpours impacted kiwifruit crops across all of the growing regions in the North Island – including Northland, South Auckland/Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Tairāwhiti.
He says Hawkes Bay got off unscathed and Nelson is having a good season.
Bond believes the damage was very isolated but some orchardists got hit badly. In some cases, the water was over the canopy of the fruit and in other instances orchardists lost all their infrastructure with posts and their crop washed away.
Other growers had water lying several feet deep in their orchards for several days and that this may pose problems in coming years.
“We are concerned about the consequence [for] plant health, which may not be seen until the next season or the season after,” he explains. “They talk about oxygen starvation, which means if the soil is too wet or there is too much surface water then the plant risks oxygen starvation.”
Bond says some growers were able to pump water from their sodden orchards into a stream or drain, while others didn’t have that option and time will tell what effect this will have. For those whose crops were completely ruined, it will take at least three years to get these up and running again.
However, while the damage was extreme on some properties, Bond says the overall loss will be marginal in terms of the national crop.
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