The Western Cape citrus season starts later than other citrus producing regions, up to four weeks later than the northern citrus areas: down south the season opens now with soft citrus, while the first Star Ruby grapefruit are already being harvested in Tshipise, close to the Zimbabwean border.In the winter of 2016, Citrusdal’s rainfall season was better than 2015 and therefore citrus producers are in a better position than last year. “There was good fruit set during August and September,” says Piet Smit, marketing director for North America, the EU and the UK at Favourite Fresh Export in his office at the company's packing plant, Cedar Pack. They haven’t yet started packing; the sorting machines are being serviced in preparation for the start of packing season in week 18, starting with clementines and early navels.
“Historically Citrusdal was a navel producing area but over the past ten years we’ve seen a trend towards soft citrus. However, the new M7 early navel cultivar shows promise and our navel estimate is 7 or 8% up. Valencias are 18 to 20% up, and soft citrus a bit higher.” He reports that last year’s harvest was very clean and, at this point, it looks like this year could be the same.
Cedar Pack handles about 500 000 to 600 000 15 kg-cartons, which is then marketed by Favourite Fresh Export. Their marketing arm that was founded around 8 years ago. The company’s production area is 300ha planted with mostly early clementines, early navels and late mandarins. Because the region is later than other citrus regions, early varieties are often planted.
Favourite Fresh Export sends about 70% of its produce overseas; the roughly 30% of citrus marketed locally accounts for just 10% of their turnover.
Consumer preferences for easy-peelers and seedless citrus drive the citrus industry. “Soft citrus is eroding the sales of hard citrus. Worldwide consumers are moving to easy peelers. The growth of lemon is due to other reasons: 80% of the time when there’s just one type of citrus in the home, it’s lemons.”
As for false codling moth, Smit says: “We’re light years away from where we were 10 or 15 years ago. We employed a totally new approach with the XSIT initiative that releases sterile moths, causing a dramatic drop in the FCM population." (Read a FreshPlaza article on the XSIT programme.)
“It’s not a silver bullet, it requires an area-wide approach, but it has been very successful here. Another approach is mating disruption, where orchards are flooded with pheromones confusing male moths who are looking for the females. Thirdly there are biological control agents of FCM and we use a combination of these three approaches, unless the FCM incidence is very high – only then do we make use of chemical intervention at the start of the season.” He expects that measures to mitigate FCM on citrus going to the EU will be introduced next year.
Smit, who has a background in entomology, continues: “Our farming practices are increasingly green. Chemical intervention is the last resort these days, not the rule. The amount of resources we devoted to fighting citrus black spot, about R1 billion [€71.67 million] yearly, shows how seriously the South African citrus industry regards export quality standards.”
For more information:Piet Smit
Cedar Pack & Favourite Fresh Export
Tel: +27 22 921 2636
Email: piet@cedarpack.com