| 35 Onyx Horticulture: Maungatapere Packing Raspberry Lush plants. Karen Phelps RURAL PEOPLE » Onyx Horticulture Blueberries present a great economic opportunity for Northland, and Maungatapere Packing is ready to help growers – both existing and new – by providing a variety of post-harvest and support services. “There is a huge amount of really good quality flat land here in Northland, and with the recent investment in water storage projects a lot of land is being unlocked for horticulture use. We see a really big opportunity in Northland for blueberries, especially early season fruit, to keep expanding the production window of blueberries in New Zealand,” says company director Patrick Malley. Maungatapere Packing has invested in equipment and technology so that it can take care of growers’ fruit right from the point of harvest. “We can supply our growers with totes that they can harvest into, each with an individual Dataphyll RFID tag that can measure the performance of each picker and provide full product traceability. Software like this provides us with a high level of confidence in terms of food safety and traceability.” Patrick says a good example of how this might be useful is when it helps pinpoint an individual worker that is picking under-ripe or over-ripe fruit, or damaging fruit during the harvest, and growers can then go back and provide further training and support to that employee. Also if there are any risks of food bourn illness from a picker, they can quickly identify every item that has been picked and remove it from the supply chain before it is tipped onto the grading machine Other technology employed by Maungatapere Packing includes a top-of-the-line TOMRA Fresh KATO260 packing line with a LUKAi camera grading system, using visible light and near-infrared technology, that can look at every single piece of fruit and then determine where it should go – fresh, frozen or waste for example. The system can efficiently optically sort, grade and pack berries at up to 260 berries per second. “It means we can be really consistent about grading every single berry that goes across that line. The AI system can look at both real and infrared light on the berry to identify maternal defects as well. It definitely represents a massive improvement compared with how we were grading fruit even five years ago.” Maungatapere Packing has also partnered with well-known horticulture software provider Radfords to manage fruit movements, quality checking and assessment to trace everything once it’s been packed from packhouse all the way through to market. “We believe that consumers should have confidence in where their food has come from, that it has been handled well and that it is safe to eat, and we want to give that level of assurance to our retail partners and grower suppliers.” Continued investment in technology is backed by investment in additional services, the latest being a pollen milling service for kiwifruit growers. For those looking to commercialise their male vines Maungatapere Packing can mill, and even market, pollen on behalf of growers. “As growers we have dabbled with doing our own pollen milling but saw a need for this as a service as kiwifruit canopy hectares in Northland have grown massively over the past few years. Our milling service means growers don’t individually need to invest in this infrastructure, and instead can just send flowers to us and we can take care of the rest. We are already pollen milling for some grower suppliers, and a number of other growers have signalled interest for this coming season,” explains Patrick. He says that applying artificial pollen to flowering kiwifruit results in increased crop yields and gives growers reassurance if weather is inclement which can inhibit bee activity during the short flowering period of three to five days (depending on variety). The process sees pollen granules extracted from harvested flowers, processed and then frozen so the pollen can be artificially be applied to female kiwifruit flowers the following season. Maungatapere Packing and sister company Maungatapere Berries, which grows a variety of berries, are a family affair, established by Patrick and wife Rebecca and Patrick’s parents Dermott and Linzi. “Our aim is to continue to grow our business and offering related horticultural services, so we are producing more good, healthy food in Northland for New Zealand and the world.”
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