Tag: grower

APPLE BUYING IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

Growing is a mug’s game – or so one of my team members often says.  Growers are at the mercy of so many things, 75% of which are completely beyond their control!  There’s the weather, the market, transport and fuel costs, compliance, staff, pests…and that’s not the complete list. So really, why would you be a grower?

Thing is, we – human beings – need food.  And food comes from the land, from growers.  So to eat, we have to have someone to grow it.

Sure, in an ideal world we can keep a chicken or two, a goat, an apple tree and a vege garden in our own back yard.  Problem is, very few countries, New Zealand included, have the luxury of sufficient arable land to give every family the quarter acre that such a utopia requires – never mind having the necessary favourable climate, let alone the skill set…
Read more »

The Australian ABC network ran a story on low banana prices in late May, stating that grower returns had dropped to A$5 a carton.  The story was picked up by Fresh Plaza, who being Dutchmen, managed to get their geography wrong and announced the story under the headline, “NZ: Bananas going dirt cheap”.  I have no problems with Australia being mistaken to be a part of New Zealand.  I refer to the Land  of OZ as our West Island quite frequently myself. 

The real news in this story is actually not that the Dutch are geographically challenged, but that Australian growers have discovered what to them seems to be a new revalation altogether.

Far North Queensland grower Doug Phillips is being qoted as saying,  he is “still sending fruit to market, but only the pick of the bunch.  We’re only sending the very best of the bunch, we’re not sending any large or mediums. If there’s any marks on it at all it’s getting thrown out.”

Well fancy that.  Australian fruit growers have discovered that one can maintain prices by “only sending the pick of the bunch” to market.  I wonder how long before they trying to patent that highly exciting bit of new knowledge they have gained  and try to sell it to us?