Ōpōtiki grower wins 2025 Kiwifruit Innovation Award
Brett Wotton, an Eastern Bay of Plenty kiwifruit grower and harvest contractor, has won the 2025 Kiwifruit Innovation Award for his work to support lifting fruit quality across the industry.
The closed tender bid process for the Gold3 licence for attracted strong participation, with over 1000 growers bidding for licence, Zespri says.
One aspect of the tender process is a good spread of hectares among growers, with 266 successful bids and an average size of bids well under 2ha for each category, it says in its Kiwiflier newsletter.
Zespri chairman Peter McBride says, "It is satisfying to see relatively broad participation in the process. The level of participation and the high median price of successful bids reflect, I believe, the strong level of confidence in the product."
The average size of the successful bid was 1.31ha for the restricted tender (for Green and Green14 conversions) and 1.77ha for the unrestricted tender.
The result indicates a good level of accessibility in the process, with just one successful bid for more than 10ha of licence. Both the restricted and unrestricted tenders were oversubscribed, and the available area was allocated to the highest priced valid bids.
The regional spread of licence allocation was concentrated in the Bay of Plenty but there were allocations also in Gisborne, Waikato, Auckland, Coromandel, Hawkes Bay and Northland.
Zespri will provide an update on the performance of Gold3 in the markets later in the season. It is expected that in November there will be sufficient information to provide the industry a clear signal regarding the potential release of Gold3 hectares
NZPork has appointed Auckland-based Paul Bucknell as its new chair.
The Government claims to have delivered on its election promise to protect productive farmland from emissions trading scheme (ETS) but red meat farmers aren’t happy.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks could have a detrimental impact on any country's rural sector, as seen in the United Kingdom's 2000 outbreak that saw the compulsory slaughter of over six million animals.
The Ministry for the Environment is joining as a national award sponsor in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards (BFEA from next year).
Kiwis are wasting less of their food than they were two years ago, and this has been enough to push New Zealand’s total household food waste bill lower, the 2025 Rabobank KiwiHarvest Food Waste survey has found.
OPINION: Sir Lockwood Smith has clearly and succinctly defined what academic freedom is all about, the boundaries around it and the responsibility that goes with this privilege.
OPINION: For years, the ironically named Dr Mike Joy has used his position at Victoria University to wage an activist-style…
OPINION: A mate of yours truly has had an absolute gutsful of the activist group SAFE.