18 | Hawke’s Bay: Berry Farms NZ T T Rosa Watson Aussie experience yields results The company produces approximately 50 per cent of New Zealand’s raspberries. REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT Providing Hawke's Bay with quality and highly trained labour Contact R&J now and take the first step towards exciting short-term job opportunities! Holly - Recruiting: (+64) 027 224 8945 Main Office – Office@rjemploy.co.nz www.rjemploy.co.nz We have a dedicated team with years of experience in horticulture and agriculture labour supply. We also hire staff for jobs such as logistics, administration, trades and services, roading, machine operating, hospitality and others. PUMPS IRRIGATION WATER TREATMENT PLUMBING Retail Stores (Open to the Public) www.thinkwater.co.nz/hawkes-bay 1203 Omahu Road Hastings (06) 650 2290 1 Dunlop Road Napier (06) 842 0047 For Hawke’s Bay berry growers Berry Farms NZ, 2023 could not have been more challenging. Things had been ticking along nicely for the company that has 15 hectares of tunnel houses with substrate grown soft berries across two farms – Astill Farm near Hastings and Bay View Farm north of Napier. Started in 2016, the company which grows and packs New Zealand Driscoll’s strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries produces approximately 50 per cent of New Zealand’s raspberries and around 85-90 per cent of New Zealand’s blackberries. Heading into 2023, production was at full capacity and system changes that had been implemented were starting to improve efficiency. “Things were looking really good,” general manager Johnny Milmine said. A visit in mid-2022 to visit Driscoll’s Australian farms in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, had been valuable, he said. “We saw how they did things after lesson learnt from their 15 years’ experience, and brought these ideas back and updated our systems to suit”. The company worked with local company ABC Software, who provide horticultural software and made upgrades to the system that helped with labour hour recording and yield reporting. “We also invested in extra machinery and equipment to improve efficiencies which were proving themselves.” All that changed on the night of February 12, when it started “bucketing with rain”. Communications were lost with Bay View Farm for over 48 hours, where members of the team were trying to salvage as much of the site as they could. No one was sure of their wellbeing and were “starting to think the worst”, Johnny said. “When you look back on it, at the time we all were thinking the worst and weren’t sure If our team was safe or not” He managed to make his way to Astill Farm where he found apples floating through the driveway, and he quickly realised the stop bank was starting to overflow. The next couple of weeks was extremely hard on the team and the company. Access from Hastings to Napier was shut off for weeks and power was off for weeks in places too. Thankfully everyone on the team was safe, and while Astill Farm suffered massive damage, work began getting things back up and running at the Bay View Farm. “Large commercial generators were running for two weeks straight at the site, which meant we could continue to irrigate,” Johnny said. Everything that was damaged had to be pulled out and the blackberries and strawberries had to be completely replanted. Fortunately, the raspberries had come through okay. It had already been an incredibly wet season, he said. “We just had so much rain. The ground was saturated, so when the cyclone came, the water didn’t soak down into the soil, it just stayed on top.” The company was not able to process for six months. Thankfully, strong relationships with contracting crews had meant staff were able to be retained and kept in work. They were seconded out into the community where needed to help with the recovery, tidying broken trees and fixing flood damage. Bay View Farm is now fully planted, and strawberry picking was due to start in mid-September. Meanwhile, it will be two years before they are able to produce berries from Astill Farm, Johnny said. “The water destroyed the irrigation electrics so we could not irrigate, and being a hydroponics growing system the plants were dead within the week.” Staff from that site were transferred to Bay View Farm. Although it had been tough few months since the cyclone, Johnny acknowledged it could have been worse. “We are a whole lot better off than so many other people. There are areas of Hawke’s Bay that are just destroyed. They have lost everything. Those families and businesses have a huge challenge in front of them.” He said the event could see a lot of growers in the horticulture rethink their systems. “You’ll probably see other growers of other products thinking about using different infrastructure.” Looking forward, personnel would be a focus for the company and maintaining the good culture at Berry Farms, he said. “One of my focuses when I started was just to get people who were trained well,, skilled at what they were doing, like minded and enjoyed what they were doing.”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDc2Mzg=