Hawke’s Bay apple grower Kent Griffiths knows a good thing when he sees it and he’s not afraid to get proactive and put ideas into action.
In 2000, he became the country’s first grower of the newly-developed Jazz apple variety and was also the first to grow Envy in 2005 – moves he knew were risky but was prepared to take.
‘When I first heard of Jazz it was still in the trial stages as number ‘T273’. I decided to take a punt and plant 1000 trees and it’s ended up being a really nice apple.’
On his 40ha orchard, Jazz and Envy now take up half his entire crop, attracting a lot of international interest from Jazz growers from Europe, the US and UK among others, keen to perfect the variety.
Griffiths’ pioneering attitude also extends to the sometimes unorthodox methods he uses running his orchard.
A couple of years ago after a bad frost, he says they carried on with their spray chemical thinning, which in effect acted like another frost.
‘That year we had one of the best crops we’ve ever had so now we still use the spray as a frost as well as carrying on our usual programme.’
The inevitable outcome from any spraying regime is how to dispose of the waste chemicals and plastic containers, and on this issue he is again being proactive.
Spray use is kept to a minimum and, although not an export standard requirement, he has a spray pad where he triple rinses his containers.
Last year he joined the Agrecovery Rural Container Recycling programme, glad there was finally a safe recycling option for his used containers.
‘We were sick and tired of putting them in landfills, and it was a bit embarrassing turning up to the dump with lots of them.
‘It’s fantastic Agrecovery is providing a way to not only get rid of the plastic containers safely, but also making good use of them by having them reprocessed into a useful end product, right here in New Zealand.’
With an Agrecovery container collection site just down the road at the local rural retailer, he says it’s convenient to drop off containers that would otherwise be an eyesore on the orchard and taking up room.
‘It’s also what customers want and Agrecovery really helps us with that.’
