Welcome to this daily update to the growers and stakeholders of Seeka. In the last 24 hours, the schedulers and harvest crews have had to be nimble as we switch out of the SunGold harvest to initiate and concentrate on the kiwistart Hayward conventional fruit.
We are pushing our people hard right across the harvesting and packing operations to chase targets and grower incentives to have fruit in store for no real commercial reason. If this was a sole charge business, no one would run it this way. However we have switched out to Hayward conventional to pack our allocation by Sunday midnight. We thank our growers and picking crews for their understanding in switching over. We will come back to SunGold through next week with one or two machines concentrating on the Hayward kiwistart allocations and switching to SunGold as required.
Most of our sheds will take Monday or Tuesday off, most of which will have worked eight days straight by then. Many of our people, particularly the key staff have made an extraordinary effort at a time of uncertainty and when labour availability is very short. At Seeka, we are going to extra efforts to support these people but I can’t but help but reflect on whether the pressure and extra hours are truly necessary. We are unnecessarily paying to rush fruit into store rather than rewarding the load out of fruit in specification when required. It’s plain nuts, and I guess I wanted to get that frustration off my chest – and thanks for letting me share it with you.
Anyway to more positive matters: There have been no serious harm injuries to date, and no significant near misses. We have successfully packed 5.3m trays of fruit including 4.521m trays of SunGold and 801k trays of Hayward. Fruit continues to be in good quality, size is small but thankfully improving in the Hayward. The SunGold conventional average size is 29.12 and Hayward conventional average size is 33.92.
We are currently finishing off the packing of SunGold for the kiwistart clearance criteria. The mainpack criteria is an average brix of 8 from midnight Thursday. It doesn’t make sense to over harvest low maturity SunGold and the better keeping fruit will have brixes above 10. The kiwistart monies for SunGold ends tonight at midnight with any hangover fruit cleared under kiwistart maturity criteria able to be packed until midnight Sunday – but without kiwistart money after tonight.
And for those of you waiting for market , Zespri has reported they had their most successful first day of sales in Japan. Long may it continue.
The first Hayward cutoff is Sunday midnight.
To the numbers:
|
SunGold conventional trays |
Industry packed 22.32 |
Seeka 4.5m (20.2%) |
|
Average size |
Industry 29.3 |
Seeka 29.1 |
|
SunGold Organic trays |
Industry packed 249k |
Seeka 13k (5.5%) |
|
Average size |
Industry 30.8 |
Seeka 29.1 |
|
Hayward conventional trays |
Industry packed 2.5m |
Seeka 801k (32.1%) |
|
Average size |
Industry 30.80 |
Seeka 33.92 |
|
Sweet Green trays |
Industry packed 65k |
Seeka nil |
|
Average size |
Industry 37.9 |
Seeka nil |
Kind regards and thank you for your support
Michael
Seeka Key
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