The present Summerfruit spokesman, and president of Marlborough Fruit Growers, Ian Mitchell has just installed a new and exciting mechanised cherry grader at the packhouse in Jefferies Road near Renwick.
The GP grader imported from Melbourne Australia de-stems, singulates and sorts the cherries into four preset fruit sizes. This will enable the packing of up to a tonne of fruit an hour compared to the previous 500kgs/hr when sorted and sized manually. It will allow staff to concentrate on fewer tasks and do a better job, focusing on quality control, and often dealing to a crop on the day of harvesting.
As well as easing the pressure on packers, it will add value to the growers' crop through the ability to accurately size the cherries, and then selecting markets that will pay a premium for a given size, as Ian explained. "We can for instance currently sell to Europe smaller cherries for the same price as we sell the big ones to Asia. The Asian market is very much size orientated and the Europeans at this stage are not. And also when you open a box, and every cherry in it is within a couple of millimeters, it does look fantastic, a great first impression."
With the high risk, high return nature of cherry crops being able to capitalise on the exceptional seasons is important. "It's very cyclic," Ian said, "I've been in the business 14 odd years and in hindsight we've had two of those seasons and through circumstances beyond our control we weren't able to capitalise on them. Ever since then I've been working towards being in a position so that when it happens again, we'll be there. That's why we are investing the sort of money we are in the industry."
"It's not a pipe dream, it will happen and if the weather keeps up the way it is at the moment, it could very well be this season."
With the exchange rate currently like it is and New Zealand's unique situation as the last place to grow cherries for the season in the world (in Otago), and with the Christmas market in Marlborough, the NZ cherry industry has strong advocates.
"There is a big surge in interest lately, I've had queries from Oamaru, Timaru, with huge plantings in Central Otago, and new plantings in Marlborough. Even with the weather and birds, on a bad season we can still make more than the grapes. The potential is in excess of $100,000/ha, the reality divide by two, by two, by two, by two. But the potentiality is possible, it could happen."
