Cyclone-hit kumara growers grateful for community help
With Northland's kumara industry back on track after the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle, one Kaipara farming couple have a simple message for those who helped: "thank you".
Fay and her husband Joe are credited with having saved the kumara when black rot threatened to obliterate the industry in the 1950s. They gifted their disease resistant strain to the nation, refusing to take any money for it.
Fay was still working in their market garden with Joe when she died peacefully after a sudden illness.
The Gocks have grown kumara for at least 60 years and were the largest growers in New Zealand in the 1950s. They were the first to raise kumara tubers by using under-earth heating in modern hotbeds.
They developed a disease-free kumara strain which became known as O-wai-raka Red. In the late 1950s theirs was the only disease-free stock in Auckland. When Ruawai and Dargaville stock was devastated by black rot they donated their stock, through the then Department of Science and Industry Research (DSIR) to help re-establish crops.
Joe told Rural News in a 2013 interview that they had developed the disease-free stock through vigorous testing, keeping the best each year. They also pioneered, with DSIR, a prototype kumara curing shed, reducing crop loss from 50% to less than 1%, enabling kumara to be marketed all year round.
The horticultural industry pioneering couple said then that adversity makes you struggle and look for answers.
They were the first in the world to put stickers on fruit, they grew seedless watermelon, and they pioneered using chilled polystyrene boxes to export broccoli.
In 2013 they won the horticulture industry’s highest honour, the Bledisloe Cup. And they won an award from the Dominion Federation of NZ Chinese Commercial Growers “in recognition of your lifetime of innovation and contribution to the horticulture industry”.
Fay Gock then was still driving the tractor on their 60ha property. Both born in China, they came separately on refugee permits to New Zealand at the end of World War II. They married in 1956, when Joe was market gardening with his father in Mangere and Fay was the daughter of a Karangahape Road, Auckland, fruiterer. The Gocks started their own growing business and a partnership of innovation which has led the industry.
