As winners of the Gordon Stephenson Trophy in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards, the Whites are marking 10 years spent so far on their quest for a better lifestyle for their family away from the city.
They found it on a bare 5.85ha block near Opotiki. Catriona’s family has been on the farm for four generations. It had been an organic dairy farm; now it is the successful Coastal Kiwis Orchard.
The pair were “rapt” to be the first horticulture business to win the NZ Farm Environment Trust (NZFET) national award. They may go to Europe for their overseas study tour.
“When we went down to Wellington and met with all the other regional finalists they were amazing,” Catriona told Rural News.
“The work they all were doing on their properties -- mainly dairy farming but also sheep and beef or whatever -- it makes you proud to be a NZ farmer. They were doing amazing work so we were humbled to win the award because any one of them would have made an ambassador.”
Catriona says Coastal Kiwis Orchard’s organic Green production roughly equals the average in conventional kiwifruit production. But they always go Kiwi Start so they crop their plants early to get a premium.
In Gold kiwifruit they are well above average for conventional and organic and get the organic premium as well.
The orchard, BioGro certified, has 3.19ha of Zespri Organic Green kiwifruit, producing in 2017 a total of 23,483 trays of Kiwi Start fruit. Zespri Organic SunGold (G3) is grown on 2.65ha, producing 38,362 trays. This production was achieved in a “challenging growing year” which included cyclones and a wet, windy autumn.
Recently developed blocks of SunGold have come into production this season. Their plant loading is designed to enable them to produce year in, year out.
The orchard uses no chemical pesticides or herbicides, instead mowing around the plants and letting grass grow a bit longer to provide living spaces and food for fauna, and to retain soil moisture. Mowed grass is mulched.
They practice ‘precision horticulture’ -- treating each vine separately.
“For example, when we prune we don’t necessarily have the same rules for every plant in every block. So we might prune different blocks differently or a couple of rows in a block differently. If one area of the block is more exposed to the wind we might prune and crop those rows differently from the rest of the block.
Although at first they knew little about kiwifruit, they did most of the physical development work themselves, keeping costs down and learning by their mistakes. Mark also did a National Certificate in Horticulture.
The farm was already organic dairy but they would have chosen to go organic anyway, says Catriona.
“Mark and I are working in the orchard; our children are young so we wanted a safe environment to work in and to produce safe food.
Mark, formerly a manager at NZ Post for 10 years, went to Lincoln University, graduating with a masters in marketing and management.
Catriona had been a primary teacher but was fulltime looking after their young children when they started.
They wanted something they could both work on.
They chose kiwifruit because having bought only 13ha they had to do something in horticulture and there was a lot of kiwifruit in the area. Her father already grew some, as did the neighbours, so the soil and climate were right for kiwifruit.
