Welcome to this week’s Seeka grower and stakeholder update. Thankfully, the last of the remaining SunGold fruit is now scheduled and will be in the packhouse as soon as we can get to it. Seeka has substantially completed the SunGold Harvest for a few weeks now with only two reluctant orchards holding out struggling to get to the required dry matter levels. We have less than 100k trays to go.
We are focussed on both the Hayward conventional and organic crops mindful of achieving a timely end date for the harvest. We managed to get some conventional fruit into controlled atmosphere storage rooms ahead of this weather event. The Hayward fruit to date has had good dry matter levels, but shape has been a constant challenge. In the first week of mainpack, we have encountered some patches of softs which has got us on high alert. We are asking our pickers to be careful and respectful of the fruit. We must be vigilant if we are expecting the fruit to store. Noting the incidence of softs, we are calling the harvest on and would like to get the fruit into the shed, while it is in optimal condition. We have the coolstore capacity and will only slow harvest if the brix-conversion ratios are lower than where we would like. We want to get on with it and are targeting an end of harvest on or around 8 June (all things being equal), and our focus is on completion with around 10m trays remaining to be packed.
Labour availability has been a continuing problem. Weekends have been challenging for sheds and we have been able to continue running only by taking RSE’s out of the orchards and sending them into the sheds. These overseas RSE workers have been invaluable in achieving our timely harvest to date. Shipping seems to be going ok, and the reefer programme has provided some stability to the shipping schedule. Our teams have been busy with big load out weeks. The current week will see Seeka load out more than 2m trays in a week, for a second time this year.
Outside of that, for the people not involved in harvest or fruit, the main game in town seems to be the Zespri SunGold trial in China. There is a lot of discussion across the fences about this. This is an important grower issue, you should vote, and if you are unsure what to do then talk to your trusted client relationship manager. And if you are the owner of an orchard leased by Seeka, we will give you a call to express our view as a grower. You might also like to listen to a podcast facilitated by NZKGI to give you a perspective. The link is here:
https://soundcloud.com/nzkgi/scott-waldron
To the numbers:
SunGold Conventional
|
Industry Submit: 98,399,052 trays |
Industry average size: 27.71 |
|
Seeka Submit: 17,371,798 trays |
Seeka average size: 27.37 |
SunGold Organic
|
Industry Submit: 2,513,187 trays |
Industry average size: 28.06 |
|
Seeka Submit: 424,216 trays |
Seeka average size: 29.11 |
Hayward Conventional
|
Industry Submit: 26,721.498 trays |
Industry average size: 32.55 |
|
Seeka Submit: 7,470,596 trays |
Seeka average size: 32.3 |
Hayward Organic
|
Industry Submit: 1,163,316 trays |
Industry average size: 34.55 |
|
Seeka Submit: 429,184 trays |
Seeka average size: 34.71 |
Sweet Green
|
Industry Submit: 261,467 trays |
Industry average size: 37.07 |
|
Seeka Submit: 58,278 trays |
Seeka average size: 37.59 |
Happy and safe harvesting.
Kind regards
Michael
Seeka Key
Contacts