The current South African kiwi harvest has just ended and it has provided positive signs that the rejuvenation of some old and neglected Hayward kiwi orchards, as well as the nascent gold kiwi production, have indeed met a demand and, in the case of the gold kiwis exports offering, a new field of play for South Africa, showed growers that their products can attain price points that are realistic and reliable.Peter Turner, director of Variety Innovation B.V., previously Biogold Intellectual Property that holds the global license for the Soreli variety, the mainstay of their gold kiwi project at the moment, says that this year’s gold kiwi exports of almost 100t to Europe was a validation of the expansion that started in 2013. “It has brought a lot of things together, giving growers confidence, and the European comment was that this was the best Soreli they’d ever tasted.”
Variety Innovation has licensed SA Kiwi Pollen (Pty) Ltd as the South African management agent.
The reason for the South African industry’s advantage lies in sugar development and is a geographical phenomenon: the northernmost of the South African kiwi production areas (on the Mpumalanga escarpment) lie on the northernmost latitudes for production in the Southern Hemisphere, increasing the number of sunlight hours per day.
The correlation between available sunlight hours and rate of ripening, and consequently harvesting window, was foremost in the mind of Variety Innovation B.V. when taking the calculated risk of establishing a gold kiwi orchard export industry here, when the traditional green kiwi export industry had never made it off the ground.
“The only way we can ‘box in the same arena’ as Chile and New Zealand, is to come in very early, before them, with fruit that has a very high brix.”
New pollinator varieties and accumulation of experience will help size
The yellow kiwi harvest from the current 22 licensed growers starts from the end of February, between Lydenburg and Nelspruit in Mpumalanga, and runs until the end of June when picking ends in the Langkloof and Waboomskraal areas. “We’re still working on a sequence of varieties to fill the harvesting window, including red kiwi varieties, and for that we’re running six trial blocks across the country, including the apple-producing areas of Elgin/Grabouw and the Koue Bokkeveld.”
In the Elgin/Grabouw area an old Hayward orchard that had been just ticking over for the past thirty years, has in the past year tripled its tonnage through employing new pollination techniques.
SA yellow kiwi brand for global market on the horizon
There is expansion of the currently 500ha-wide kiwi industry in South Africa. “The curve runs upwards but it’s not a hockey stick”. He continues: “One of the negatives of the past season is that local yellow kiwi consumption is a very small percentage of local kiwi sales. This season has shown that there’s good export demand but local demand needs work.” He mentions prominent local retailers that are eager to undertake yellow kiwi promotional campaigns among South African consumers, who currently buy the yellow kiwi under the Kiwigold brand.
An international brand for South African yellow kiwis, produced by an industry that’s increasingly seeing the advantage of cooperation in competing on the global market, will be launched in the not-too-distant future but the group is waiting for young orchards to mature in taste and size as growers gain more experience. “If you don’t have a standard, you have nothing, but in the beginning years it’s more important to build grower support,” he says. “The timing of the launch of an international brand will have to be right. You need a critical mass of quality to sustain a brand – the consumer only has to be disappointed once.”
Low-chill kiwis less adaptable than low-chill blueberries to South African conditions
One of the reasons that the South African kiwi industry didn’t take off like other industries did, among other factors like a mismatch between pollinators and female plants, was the use of high-chill varieties which have since been replaced by more suitable lower-chill varieties.
However, Turner warns against the ‘Dutch courage’ engendered by the blueberry wave in South Africa: low-chill blueberry varieties have prospered in unlikely places in South Africa, and articles on the positive outlook of the kiwi industry lead growers to believe that low-chill kiwi varieties can be successfully grown in the same areas, but the latter still has an annual threshold of 500 chilling hours on the Richardson scale. As he points out, even some of South Africa’s cooler production areas only attain that threshold two years out of five, rendering it sub-optimal for kiwi production, even low-chill yellow kiwis, and therefore “we’re rather discouraging people from coming aboard if their microclimate isn’t exactly right. It’s so important for growers to know their own microclimate.”
The kiwi export industry will need five or six successful years to change the view of a ‘sceptical’ banking sector, but Peter Turner is encouraged by what he has seen this year. They are looking towards the future, providing technical expertise to emerging black kiwi farmers in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.
“The endgame we’re moving towards is to be self-sufficient in kiwi, both green and yellow, for eight or nine months of the year. There’ll always be imports but the current price that local consumers pay is high. Unlike other high-value commodities which took years to achieve price parity, the kiwi already has price parity. If you take out the transport costs from New Zealand, you can sell a top quality product for a reasonable price, while still offering good profitability to farmers, retailers and consumers in the future.”
For more information:
Peter Turner
Variety Innovation B.V. (EU)
Tel: +27 82 894 5938
Email: peter@sorelikiwi.com