Welcome to our first update in the 2017 New Zealand kiwifruit harvest. The first week is complete for Sungold [midnight Thursday night cut off] and we are pleased with our progress.
Peninsula, Huka Pak and Oakside have all received and processed fruit to be fully packed out at the midnight cut off last night. The relocated Peninsula machine has started up well and a credit to the teams involved. Outside of a few minor start up issues, the sites have all started without incident. The new machine at Main Road Katikati is set to be commissioned tomorrow and set to receive fruit with the next clearances. Transpack and KKP are all set and ready to go.
The SunGold has been reasonably clean but with the occasional soft patch and wind damage. Quality is ok. The fruit size is enormous and we packed a line this week with an average size 22 packing the entire line into single layer trays size 18 and 22, and we receiving 70 bins more than we expected. While we are grateful for the early fruit, the economics of the shed were completely destroyed. The SunGold maturity has seemingly stalled with dry matter accumulation the issue.
The key point is that in the clearances many orchards are receiving partial clearances, say to size 33 or 36. It doesn’t matter about the other sizes not cleared if you have none in the orchard.
SunGold orchard maturities are slow in the Bay of Plenty with most of our clearances coming from the Hawkes Bay, East Cape and Coromandel.
We have achieved our first clearance for Hayward Conventional and will get to this as soon as the weather clears. In the case of Hayward, black seeds are the issue in achieving clearance.
Packed Statistics
SunGold
| Seeka packed | 256,550 trays | Industry packed | 2,512,415 trays |
| In store | 256,550 trays | Average size | 26.7 |
Our first vessel for China has loaded and the first Japan vessel loads this weekend.
The majority of Gold 3 clearance are only for limited sizes. From all of the clearance results we have seen a drop off in the dry matter and fresh weight accumulation. Colour development continues to progress, and our teams are ensuring the correct colour management of the packed inventory by size. Brix levels continue to climb slowly although we haven’t really seen a lot of change in these over the past week. The industry trends appear to be similar to those we are seeing.
Hayward conventional dry matter has fallen away further since the data shown on the roadshows last week, and although still tracking better than last year dry matter is unlikely to be as high as it was in 2015. Fruit size continues to track above the last five years, and brix levels continue to track on average around 4.2. Growers of early start fruit though are recommended to check their fruit size.
The last of the kiwiberry crop is being picked this week and packing will go through until Tuesday next week. There have been a number of challenges with this harvest, from maturity through to the weather
Thursday 30 March, at 3pm is the opening of the Grower Centre at Seeka 360. All our growers and stakeholders are invited to attend.
Kind regards
Michael
Seeka Key
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