Kiwifruit: Cold September puts dampener on growers’ bumper season expectations

In the autumn 2024 harvest, growers produced a record-breaking 197 million trays of fruit worth $3.1 billion by the year ended August 2024. Photo / RNZ / Angus Dreaver

By RNZ

Initial enthusiasm among kiwifruit growers for a terrific fruit-producing season has been tempered as a colder September knocked flower development for some growers.

This season (harvest autumn 2024), growers produced a record-breaking 197 million trays of fruit worth $3.1 billion in the year ended August 2024, and while it was too early in the growing season to say what the next harvest would produce, good bud burst had not translated into good flower numbers for some orchardists.

Bay of Plenty-based Fruition Horticulture consultant Sandy Scarrow said this has particularly been the case for growers in Bay of Plenty and Gisborne, and what was one of the best bud bursts she had seen in her 38 years in the industry has not progressed.

“Some of the orchards had floral bud abortion, and so we’ve ended up with some pretty patchy numbers of flowers from those buds that have burst across the industry.

“On average it’s looking okay, but there are some orchards [that aren’t okay], and we think it’s just to do with the timing of where the buds were at when we had those cold snaps in September.”

Bay of Plenty kiwifruit orchardist David Jensen said the patchiness of the season was highlighted across his four orchards nestled in hills, at different altitudes, behind Tauranga.

He said a month ago, everyone in the industry was thinking it would be “a ripper of a season” and expecting fruit to be everywhere.

That feeling was now slightly more muted.

“Two of our orchards have currently got below-average flower counts per square metre, and it sort of translates at this early stage into looking like a maybe 30% drop in fruit compared to last year, but last year was a very good year for us.

“And the two higher orchards aren’t anywhere near as badly affected.”

He said September was 1.3C colder on average than last year and there were some chilly days which, even though there was no frost, did impact flower numbers, with those in the very early stages of development falling off the vine.

Jensen also chairs investment firm MyFarm, and says across its portfolio of 17 to 18 orchards – most in Bay of Plenty and a few in Northland – the drop in flower numbers was not as dramatic as in two of his orchards.

He said while lower fruit numbers on some orchards would translate into less fruit, that fruit would be bigger and “that’s not a bad thing”, adding that last season, fruit sizes were a little small.

Scarrow cautioned that the industry did not want fruit that was too big either, because a lot of markets did not want large fruit.

There was still a lot of growing to go before the harvest, so Jensen said it was hard to know exactly what the cool September would mean for tray numbers.

- RNZ