In Australia, the mango season is heating up. Some 500,000 trays are being picked and packed this week. The current crop forecast has Australia on track to produce more than 9 million trays this season, which is up on last year, but growers are facing plenty of challenges to get fruit to market.
The Darwin region keeps getting rain, which is delaying the harvest and creating some quality issues. In other places, magpie geese are hungry for the mangoes this year, descending onto the crops much earlier this year. Then, a severe storm swept across several mango orchards this month, blowing a lot of fruit off trees.
"We probably lost about 30 per cent of our remaining crop in that storm," grower Leo Skliros said. "Some plantations lost more than 60 per cent of their crop ... I'd say about 150,000 trays of mangoes in this area just fell to the ground."
The crop forecast suggests the national harvest will peak towards the end of November and there will be a few weeks of overlap between the Northern Territory and Queensland harvests, which could put pressure on prices. Some early fruit has already been picked in WA's Ord Valley and in Queensland's Bowen region.
Source: abc.net.au
