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Week ending Sunday 3 May 2020 Welcome to Seeka’s latest grower and stakeholder update. The SunGold harvest is in the home straight and is expected to be complete in the next few days. Machines are progressively being switched to Hayward with Transpack already having made the transition. Peninsula and Huka Pak machine 2 have completed their SunGold and waiting for Hayward fruit, and the other machines and pack houses will switch over as soon as they clear their remaining fruit. Having worked for an extended period of time and over the weekend the sheds will be taking day off early in the week as they finish SunGold and transition into the Hayward mainpack. The labour shortage is starting to be addressed. Firstly orchard pickers have been working in the sheds over the past few days during the rain, and we are starting to receive RSE workers transferring in from the Hawkes Bay. These workers have completed their programs but because they cannot travel home, their visa’s have been extended and they have sensibly been allowed to transfer between regions and work in kiwifruit. At the moment these people are sitting idle in the Hawkes Bay so bringing them to our industry achieves two goals. Getting them working and it helps us with our labour shortage. Although these people are untrained in kiwifruit they have worked in the apple industry. We are working through the process of planning how they get trained so we can deploy skilled people. This initiative is important to ensuring that our growers have access to trained staff to get their orchards pruned on time. The increased number of RSE’s means we need more accommodation. There is an accommodation shortage and we are looking for fully furnished accommodation suitable for RSE workers at an economic rate. Any accommodation that we might use will need to be of a standard to exceed the minimum specifications set and audited by MBIE. The audit can be undertaken by Seeka with the audit finding and recommendation submitted to MBIE for their review and endorsement. If you know of suitable accommodation in the Bay of Plenty, Coromandel or Kerikeri region then please let your CRM know and they will follow up with our RSE team. To the numbers:
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