Kiwifruit legacy grows from halting sprawl

The kiwifruit orchards of the Nga¯i Tukairangi Trust were set up in 1980 as a family initiative to halt urban sprawl onto tribal lands in the Bay of Plenty.

Today the trust is the largest Ma¯ ori kiwifruit grower in the country.

It now has more than 2000 shareholders and employs more than 50 people as well as 100 seasonal workers a year, chairman Ratahi Cross said. Cross’ family is the largest shareholder, owning 60 per cent.

‘‘In the early days of kiwifruit there was a lot of infighting between growers . . . People would undercut each other. It was really cutthroat,’’ he said.

In the late 1980s the trust started to buy up neighbouring land, and later the creation of Zespri in 1997 helped to turn its fortunes around. ‘‘In the 1990s, right up to 2000, it was a struggle,’’ Cross said.

Ten good years of growth followed before the bacteria PSA struck kiwifruit vines across the country, devastating the industry.

But the trust survived where others failed because it had been sitting on savings. It was able to convert orchards to a new variety of gold kiwifruit right away and purchase surrounding orchards cheaply.

‘‘We know how to grow food – and if something is cheap, it’s worth having a punt on. Within the period of recovery, [the orchards] tripled in value and that gave us a massive advantage,’’ Cross said.

Now ‘‘Nga¯ i Tuks’’, as Cross affectionately refers to it, has orchards spanning a total of 118 hectares in Tauranga and Hawke’s Bay.

The trust produces about 1.7 million trays of kiwifruit a year, all for export. The Hawke’s Bay orchards were planted with the Sungold variety, while in Tauranga it was 60 per cent Sungold and 40 per cent green.

All the trust’s orchards were in the process of undergoing organic conversion, which took three harvest cycles, Cross said.