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The Roslé Group has converted table grapes to blueberries to complement their citrus production

First blueberry harvest coming in from the Loskop Valley, Limpopo

On a former tobacco farm turned fruit farm by Charles Rossouw, the usual combination of citrus and table grapes in this region has been replaced with a citrus-blueberry combo. 

Lying closer to the cooler Mpumalanga Highveld than grape growers further north, the Roslé Group of farms outside Groblersdal, Limpopo Province, usually receives more frequent rainfall during the critical harvesting period from late November, tiny amounts every night at times, resulting in burst grapes.

Having for many years delivered their table grapes and citrus to United Exports, they knew about the company’s blueberry expansion. “We’d always been keeping our ear to the ground and we visited berry farms in the Cape and Limpopo and it looked good, the feedback from farmers was good. So we decided to move closer to the fire,” Charles Rossouw explains.

He continues: “Being the only berry growers in the Loskop Valley, we’re learning as we go along. We still have to pay our school fees but it looks promising. We’re quite bullish. We’re going in big, to take advantage of economic scale advantages, because prices are going to drop dramatically in the future. In fact, prices have already started going down as more volumes start coming in.”



First harvest even from bushes planted in January
Their oldest berry orchards are just about a year old, and they’re already harvesting from bushes planted this January. The last block cleared of table grapes is currently being planted with berry plugs. They’re investing in the Australian low-chill Ozblu cultivars like Julieta, Bella, Magica, Bonita and Monica, a bit more of Julieta and Bonita because of its high early yield, while it’s expected of Magica to have the highest yield from its second year onwards.

Their harvest started in week 29 this year but pruning manipulation from end of November enables them to concentrate the harvest on the export window between week 37 and week 47 to the EU and the UK. This year, with the early end of the European season, there was strong local demand from supermarkets for South African berries.

Picked berries are brought down from field temperature to 6°C on the farm and transported at that temperature to United Exports’ Johannesburg packhouse, where it is force-cooled to -1°C, its in-transit temperature. 

There is a tiny amount flown out, primarily for selective destinations like Dubai, but mostly their berries go to British and German supermarkets, with its concomitant intensive accreditation processes. 


Charles Rossouw, managing director of the Roslé Group, with Koos de Wet, general manager, and PP Roets, berry coordinator

Young blueberry industry follows biological path to large degree
The nascent blueberry industry in South Africa is, by necessity, a progressive one: given a limited repertoire of chemical products registered for use, blueberry growers like Roslé follow a largely biological regimen.

“It becomes difficult to keep all the balls in the air with the increasingly stringent MRLs,” says Koos de Wet, general manager on the farm. “We use a wide range of biological products, like predatory mites to control thrips or streptomycetes applied to the soil to combat soil-borne diseases. We’ve had good results with an enzyme that attacks the chitin of thrips eggs and the exoskeleton of mealybug. We already were on a biological path with our citrus and table grapes, but with blueberries it’s at an even higher level. We only spray soft products against botrytis and rust.”

PP Roets, blueberry coordinator at the Roslé Group, concurs. “Grapes are easy – you just follow a spray programme but with berries – some markets only want to pick up three MRLs and then it may not even be 100% of the EU residue level but only 33% of the EU MRL. It’s not easy achieving that.”

“You have to live GlobalG.A.P. As a fruit farmer you live under a magnifying glass,” Koos de Wet remarks. “Other farmers like grain farmers aren’t used to the paper trail.”

All of their current 65ha of blueberries are planted in the soil, amended with pine bark chips as well as composted pine bark to bring the soil’s pH down. These are applied at a rate of 300 m3 of bark and 150 m3 of compost per hectare. Their water from Loskop Dam is also acidified to a level of 5.2. All berries are under blue shade nets to stimulate flowering and fruiting.

Berry production is a job creator
Berry production is very labour-intensive. At the moment they’re employing more than a hundred seasonal pickers, and they’re not even at full production. 

PP Roets expects that they’ll employ around 300 pickers next year and almost a thousand the year after. This is job creation on a significant scale, because after the four months of the berry harvest, the citrus harvest starts a few months later, meaning employment for fruit pickers for eight months of the year. 

“And it’s employment for unschooled workers, particularly women who are often sole breadwinners. Someone has to provide this kind of entry-level employment,” says Charles Rossouw. “It’s a clean business because we have high hygiene standards. It’s not out in the dust or under the hot sun.”

The farm places large emphasis on the development of its labour force, which ranges from 700 to over a thousand during harvest, through training and learnership programmes to selected employees, and they’re proud of the high mark awarded them by SIZA (Sustainability Initiative of South Africa) accreditors, which is a measure of the ethical standards of employment and living conditions of live-in employees. SIZA accreditation is becoming increasingly important to some overseas markets. “United Exports have really been very helpful. You’re not on your own in this process and it really helps,” says Mari-Louise Stevens Roets, who is responsible for the farm’s accreditation, with its prodigious administrative load. They were, for instance, recently successfully audited by Marks&Spencer for blueberries.

They’re currently level 5 BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) compliant. A neighbouring citrus farm is partly owned by the Roslé Group and by the members of the Silver Charm Trust, which was set up for longterm employees to give them more of a stake in the group’s citrus production. Pension and life insurance are also provided for longterm employees.

Adding blueberries to citrus has enabled the Roslé Group to dovetail fruit production, enabling efficient use of labour throughout the year, and increase their competitiveness in the market with a crop with a big future.


Currently there are 65ha of blueberry plantings at the Roslé Group

For more information:
Charles Rossouw
Roslé Group of Companies
Tel: +27 71 699 0251