Welcome to Frankly Speaking, our grower and stakeholder update for the week ended midnight Sunday 5 April. It was a remarkable week given the challenges and circumstances around us. Growers, pickers and harvest contractors and post-harvest have made a remarkable effort to get the fruit into the sheds and in a box. Everyone has pulled together and performed really well and the teams packed everything that was needed to be packed by midnight last night.
I would like to make a special mention of the key-staff in post-harvest (right across the Industry) who have worked long shifts over many days without a break. Key staff includes roles like our packing supervisors, quality controllers, grading supervisors, EDI staff, coolstore and load-out personnel. Honestly their effort and commitment is more than remarkable. They have the added uncertainty of being unable to predict when they might be able to take a break, many of them with families at home. In the current environment for some this means they are unable to attend to the basics of life – like a grocery shop. In highlighting these people, I am not trying to downplay the efforts of others but rather highlight and recognise an extraordinary effort. Our focus is now regularising our production cycle (weather excepted), and achieving full productive capacity to safely get the fruit harvested, into store and out to market. Most sheds are taking the day off today with Huka Pak packing organic fruit today and taking the day off tomorrow. Katikati and Peninsula are packing through, having had time off last week.
We remain very short of people, particularly in Te Puke and Katikati. We have yet to stress test our picking capability – don’t worry it's coming. The construction and installation of the screens has allowed our packing capacity to increase. The only machine now to bring on-stream is Oakside 1. We tried to commission Oakside 1 over the weekend, but with the no show of 75% of the people who had confirmed, we were not able to get this machine operating. We will try again later this week. I remain more than disappointed with KGI. Labour isn’t their domain, and I am dismayed that they suggested on television over the weekend that there isn’t a labour shortage when both of the bigger operators in the Industry are saying that the problem is acute, particularly for experienced staff. Unfortunately the payment of fees to KGI is not currently optional.
Our grower entities team is currently working on analysing the financial effect of removing taste from this year’s grower payments. We understand that growers will be thinking about provisional tax and needing to estimate earnings, something quite difficult this year with the uncertainties of the market, Zespri’s forecast reduction in OGR’s, and the removal of taste payments. The removal of taste payments will impact the quantum and timing of progress payments to growers. While kiwistart and taste payments will be less, the fruit value progress payments should be substantially more. We are just working through the scenarios and will quantify the impact later this week.
In response to requests, please see below a picture of an example of the screens at Oakside 2:
To the numbers:
|
SunGold conventional trays |
Industry packed 25.2m |
Seeka 5.1m (20.2%) |
|
Average size |
Industry 29.4 |
Seeka 29.2 |
|
Seeka in store |
2.0m |
On order 1.3m |
|
SunGold Organic trays |
Industry packed 258k |
Seeka 20k (7.7%) |
|
Average size |
Industry 30.6 |
Seeka 29.1 |
|
Seeka in store |
11k |
On order 792 |
|
Hayward conventional trays |
Industry packed 6.19m |
Seeka 1.69 (27.4%) |
|
Average size |
Industry 33.72 |
Seeka 33.74 |
|
Seeka in store |
1.06m |
On order 1.3m |
|
Hayward Organic trays |
Industry packed 50k |
Seeka nil |
|
Average size |
Industry 37.6 |
Seeka |
|
Seeka in store |
Nil |
On order nil |
|
Sweet Green trays |
Industry packed 121k |
Seeka nil |
|
Average size |
Industry 37.9 |
Seeka |
|
Seeka in store |
Nil |
On order nil |
Seeka Key
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