The Summerfruit NZ team have just spent a few days in Hawkes Bay, where we visited growers and spent time refining our work programme. While we were there, we also dropped into the NZAPI office to catch up with Terry Meikle and his team.
The SummerGreen meeting on Tuesday afternoon was quite well attended by growers and others in the wider summerfruit industry. Speakers presented on a variety of topics including Jeff Smith from A-Lighter-Touch (ALT) who spoke about the ALT program, Paul Munroe gave an update on the results of the Movento off-label trials held over the summer, and Matt Carter gave an update on an ALT project on understory planting in citrus orchards in Gisborne. Duncan Scott of Plant & Food Research outlined the SFFF project into Future Orchard Planting Systems. Abigal Evans introduced the Find-A-Pest app which anyone can use to report findings of new pests or diseases, and Richard Mills gave an overview of wholesale and retail value trends over the past few years. Finally, Sally Anderson presented the work undertaken so far on Summerfruit NZ’s refresh of our research and development portfolio and sought further feedback from attendees. Thank you to Bayer for sponsoring the refreshments.
We are re-running a similar agenda for SummerGreen meetings scheduled in Blenheim (23 May) and Alexandra (9 June). The venue and time details for these meetings are below – we hope to see you there!
The Summerfruit NZ Board met in Wellington recently for two days. Day one was spent taking stock and looking at the activities that SNZ should be prioritising over the next year and beyond, with the second day being a full Board meeting. We’re preparing for the AGM later in the year on 5 August – voting members can expect correspondence on the AGM in early June.
The Summerfruit NZ team has now moved out of our Wellington office. Andrea and I have split our time between a co-worker space in Wellington CBD and working from home. Richard (based in Hastings) and Tracey (based in Arrowtown) work remotely, so the overhead costs of running the team have reduced markedly over the past six months. This is a reflection of the new business environment we are all operating in where change is the only constant, requiring us to keep adapting and looking for efficiencies and smarter ways of working.
