(COUNTRY MUSIC) - (WHISTLES) - Always a favourite on every rural road ` Hyundai Country Calendar. - It's going to be the best crop we've ever pulled off this block. - A Gisborne family growing a business for the future... - To have our first bins going through the shed was quite moving, really. - ...and providing jobs for workers from near and far. - I think this one is perfect. - It's really just up to us, from now on, to see that it is a success. Captions by Faith Hamblyn. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2024. (RELAXED MUSIC) - At Heavitree Fruit Farms, just outside Gisborne, on the road to Ormond, they're harvesting oranges. (MUSIC CONTINUES) Stephen Newman set up the business 35 years ago with his wife, Val. And in the last few years, the couple's son Scott has returned home to help run the business. - Fruit looks really clean. I think it'll go through the packhouse pretty well, eh? - It should do. Yeah. Good size, good colour. It's a big improvement on last year. We've got youngish trees, so they're improving every year. They call it a Valencia Late 2. And the beauty about it is it's seedless. It's very good for the juice market, domestic market. They hang on to the tree really well. We can start harvesting them now, which is about, uh... What are we? Late October, and then we can harvest them right through to April. And they grow really well in Gisborne here. This block here belongs to Scott and Laura, and they've been on here now for a few years, and Scott's strengths are, I guess, he has a lot of youthfulness and keen energy that, as we get a little bit older, we don't always have. - I'll come back later on and load everything up on the big truck. - I've been orcharding now for 35 years, and I've, sort of, you know, been around for a while. But Scott's really keen on the technology part, the packhouse part of it, the promotional part, the buyers and all that sort of stuff. He's been around orcharding for a long time, so he's quite capable on tractors and machinery and complements our own business. We can put staff in here and share machinery a little bit and, uh, share ideas, so, um,... no, it's working really well. - British backpackers Sophie Lawson and Callum Cassidy have been professional orange pickers for just a couple of hours. - I'm from a region called Suffolk, and I'm a farming family girl. We're pig farmers back home. And when we came out to New Zealand, we wanted to have a bit of time working on a farm and experience, you know, what it's like to be a farmer out here. We loved Gisborne, and we met Stephen and Scott, and we loved it, so we decided to stay on. I'm no professional, but, I mean, it's quite therapeutic. It's quite nice to be able to fill up the bucket as quickly as you can. And I think we're a little bit competitive, Callum and I, so it's quite good in that respect. - Sophie's much more stylish then I am; bit quicker, too, I'd say, as well, but I won't be saying that again as well ` she'll hold that against me. (CHUCKLES) No, we're loving it. It's brilliant. It's a great country, and we really like Gisborne as well. It's a beautiful place. (RELAXED MUSIC) - These oranges are now destined for the Newmans' packhouse, just a couple of hundred metres along the road. This 7-hectare block has been home to Stephen and Val for more than 35 years. And this morning, Val's busy at the sorting table. - Well, we're grading the fruit at the moment. Before we start, we brief the staff on what we're looking for, the faults in the fruit ` uh, things like misshapen fruit or things with too much blemishes on them. They will be regraded and sold into the market, perhaps, like, in bulk. - This thing here is what we call a colour sorter. It takes a whole bunch of photos and measures the diameter of the fruit. Also, for when we go into, say, apples or limes, we can colour sort it, so we can have some high-coloured fruit dropping down in one lane and lesser-coloured fruit dropping down in another lane. It's going to be packed today, and we'll ship it tomorrow, and we're likely to ship it all around New Zealand. - If the packhouse here looks new, that's because it is ` it's been up and running for just three months. - Before, we could run about 20 or 30 bins a day; now we can probably do a hundred to 130 bins a day. So what's that, five times? We're reasonably pleased. It should hold us in good stead for the next 10 to 15 years. - The new packhouse was built after a fire ripped through the Newmans' old shed in October 2021. - I was here by myself ` it was a Friday. I already had done all my things for the farmers' market, had ready for that and decided to go inside and start dinner. And there was smoke coming across the windows. And, uh, when I opened up the door to investigate, there was smoke coming from our shed. So I quickly ran into the shed as far as I could go and started removing vehicles and get on to the forklift and remove pallets of apples. And, yeah, it was pretty crazy. By that stage, the fire was... totally engulfed in the shed, and, um,... yeah, it was pretty... Sorry. - You sort of go into a bit of shock. It's a bit surreal, seeing everything just going up in smoke. And it was really intense. There was a lot of bins and packaging in there, and it was just giving off a real... Something you'd see in the movies. - It took us a while to get over the shock of just losing everything. And, yes, it did make us, uh, sit down and, sort of, say to ourselves, like, 'OK, so what are we gonna do?' - I'd like to see opportunities after every, sort of, disaster. We've had a few over the years, whether it's Bola or Gabrielle, or this. And I thought, 'Well, it's an opportunity 'to build a purpose-built shed.' - Building the shed was a huge undertaking,... - Tea's made. - ...but it's given the family security and a base for their business that they can build on. - An asset like this, hopefully will be here 50 years' or 80 years' time, you know, when we are gone or retired or sold or... you know, it'll be here. I think it's an opportunity. We've started a new business... entity in there, and I think it's a good business for us, to be packing our own fruit. - But it's not just citrus that they grow and pack here. (GENTLE MUSIC) (GENTLE MUSIC) At Te Karaka, half an hour northwest of Gisborne, citrus-grower Stephen Newman and his family have a second block of land, where apples are the main crop. This morning, they're readying the trees, to give them the best chance of a good crop in summer. - You've got a lot of fruit ` no doubt about it. - OK. - We've got a lot of fruit, so we're gonna have to get stuck in with some chemical thinning here. - Stephen has Hugh O'Donnell here from Horticentre, to advise them on thinning the fruit. - You can just see how much fruit we're setting upstairs. So in terms of timing the application, we really want the fruit up there to be 14 mils. So, you know, we're sitting there, right in the slot, for this chemical thinner. So really happy with that. - We wanna get the right number of fruit on these trees, so we set it up for harvesting in mid-January to mid-February. You have to take into account the trees have been through a bit of stress with the flooding, the root stock, crop load. So these guys are really important to what we do, and, uh, we value their, uh, opinion and advice. - They're growing at about a mill a day at the moment. It's nice and warm. So, yeah, I would've thought probably Saturday. You know, so Wednesday today, Saturday. - Yeah. OK. So you've got to get this chemical thinner on at the optimum time, to remove the right amount of fruit. If we get it right, it makes a job a lot more profitable. If we get it wrong, it can be a very expensive job, hand-thinning these trees. - The town of Te Karaka is low-lying, and the orchard is right next to the Waipaoa River. And when Cyclone Gabrielle hit in February 2023, the stopbanks couldn't hold back the water. - The power went out, internet went down, everything ` phones and everything went down. And then we realised, hey, we've got, uh, silt all through the blocks and machinery, hydro ladders were flooded above the bonnets, and tractors were flooded, two houses were flooded and stuff like that. And, yeah, it was difficult, actually, cos we'd been through Bola, but the silt level dropped in our orchard was a lot less than Bola. So in Bola, we had up to a foot and a half, 2ft of silt ` this time round was only, sort of, like, 6 inches to 8 inches. And being through it one time before, I sort of knew that when it's dried out, it was gonna sort of shrink up quite a lot. But it was trying to manage the trees, keep them alive and just the whole shock of the whole thing. But every year something pops up, and it's not an easy industry to be in, horticulture, but the rewards are there, and you're your own boss, and you're growing a nice, natural product that people like eating. And it's healthy, unprocessed ` reasonably simple if you get it right. But having good support around ` Val and Scott and other family members, uh, it's good. - Back at the home block, the harvest team have switched to mandarins. - These are Encore mandarins, and we've had them in the ground for about 10 or 12 years now. They're very nice eating, but a lot of growers have pulled them out around New Zealand, and so there's a bit of a market for them at the moment. - Richard Marr is one of Stephen's head pickers. - We're going for size ` over 50 mil. Anything under 50 mil, you just leave on the tree and comes here at Christmastime and pick it. Full colour, no green. - Richard's been with us for three or four years, and he likes harvesting here. He's a good contract picker, and he's a good connection between the, sort of, packhouse and the field staff. Also, he helps with, if we've got backpackers or new staff coming in ` he encourages them a bit, and they sort of see where they could get to if they wanna take a career in fruit picking. So he's the equivalent of, like, a 400-a-day sheep shearer, I reckon ` you know, he just gets in there, and he's just into it, doesn't complain, gets on with it, and, yeah, no, he's really good. We've got a few like that, and we're harvesting fruit for about 10 months of the year, so he's got a lot of fruit harvesting to do. - Oh, you just train your eye into it. I do it by my hand ` 55 mil. If it doesn't fit your hand, don't pick it. (GENTLE MUSIC) (MUSIC CONTINUES) - Three months later, in early February, and at Te Karaka, they're harvesting Royal Gala apples. - Chemical thinning went well. We haven't had to do too much hand-thinning, and size in this block is particularly good at the moment. So we'll be picking some of this for export and some for the local market. Yesterday I think we picked about 30-odd ton, and we'll do that for a good number of days. We'll come to these trees twice or three times and pick off the high coloured stuff that's ready to come off, with the maturity right. And so we could harvest these over about a three- or four-week period. We have Chester ` he's been with us for about a year or so, Richard's been with us for the last three or four years, so these guys today are working the tractors. We've got about 20-odd pickers on here at the moment, and they're moving bins up and down the rows and taking the bins out. We have a QC that goes around checking on the pickers, to make sure everything's right, whether they're taking the right fruit off and not leaving too much fruit on and they're not bruising the fruit or anything like that. - QC, or Quality Control, is done by Florian Couturier. - The apple are really good. Yeah, there is a good colour, and also the size is good. Yes, very perfect. I come from Normandy, in France, and my main job here is to ensure the quality of the apples. - One more bag? - BOTH: Yeah. - A good apple, it's when we have 80% of red on the apple, so it's really important; it's the first condition. And also we need to have a good size, so I have to check that in the bins of the different pickers here. So, yeah, really good job. Thank you so much. - Cheers. Thank you. I'm gonna carry on and bring more up. - Yeah. OK. Perfect. See you later. My parents are farmers in France, so we have a dairy farm, and also we produce cider and apple juice. I was really interesting to discover more about the apple production, to discover different way of working here, so, yeah, it's a really good opportunity. - From the orchard, the apples are loaded up and taken back to the home block for packing. VOICEOVER: Get your free 'Consumer's Guide to Hearing Aids', New Zealand's only independent guide to all the latest models. Choose the right hearing aid for your lifestyle and budget. Call 0800 45 45 42 for your free copy. (RELAXED MUSIC) Heavitree Fruit Farms, near Gisborne, has its own packhouse, right next to the orchard. Today, Scott Newman is overseeing the first of the new season's fruit. - We're considerably early with the apples, so that also means that the apples may not be as large as we like. So when we're picking early, that means the fruit might be smaller; then the markets want that small fruit into bags. And as time goes on in the next coming weeks, the fruit just naturally increases in size, and then we kind of slow down on the bagged apples, and it just gets more put into the cartons. The small apples ultimately end up in, uh, lunchboxes all around the country. What we try and do with me, Mum and Dad, is Dad's in charge of the orchard side of things or the contractors. I think we have about 20 pickers out there today, and Dad overlooks all the pickers and makes sure the orchard's running smoothly. I'm in the shed, making sure everything's running smoothly in here as possible. And Mum, she also helps me do a lot of the paperwork and dispatching that happens every day. And, yeah, me and Mum together make sure the shed runs really smoothly. - I can do everything in this packhouse. And so I think it's quite good for morale, as well, that they see that the management... is doing what they're doing ` you know, the staff. So I just help out where I can ` where I see a hole in the work. If I see that, you know, some of the graders are having a little bit of a hard time on the grading machine, if there's a lot of spoiled fruit or something coming through, then they just have to ask. And also the packers, you can tell when they're falling behind, because their lanes are starting to get really full. So, yeah, you just go and help. (FORKLIFT BEEPS) - Apples are a lot more labour-intensive inside the shed ` There's a lot more jobs that involve, you know, like, moving the apples around or putting packaging into certain locations. So with the citrus, we might have four to six people inside the shed, but with apples, we can have up to 20 people in here. - This current crop of workers has come from far and wide. - My name is Luciana. I am from Argentina. - My name is Danick, and I'm from Czech Republic. - Pedro ` I am from Uruguay. - I am from Argentina. - From Spain. - Uruguay. - Czech Republic. - Argentina. - I'm from Uruguay. - Kia ora. I'm Samara, and I'm proud to be a local from Gisborne, Turanganui-a-Kiwa. - As if things weren't busy enough, Val has another task that needs doing ahead of the farmers' market tomorrow. - We started doing apple juice and orange juice, and we became the distributors for Simply Squeezed. And I was going into the restaurants every week, and we thought, 'Well, what else can we provide them besides juice?' And coffee, sort of, came to our minds. We started doing maybe six different types of beans, just getting advice or reading what the most popular ones would be. And then we actually were brave enough to enter a couple of coffee competitions, and from that competition, we won a bronze, and we won a silver. So it kind of gave us the confidence that we were on the right track, and just the popularity of the coffee beans being bought at the farmer's market, it started to expand. - And with the farmers' market tomorrow, Stephen Newman has a couple of additional crops to add to the list. - It's a nice-looking bunch of bananas. I think the price is around about sort of $6 to $8 a kilo, and I'm probably holding here maybe, I dunno, 6 or 7 kilos, so could be worth 50 bucks, that bunch there. They seem to grow quite well here, and they're quite an easy crop to grow, um, but we'll see what we can do with them at the farmers' market tomorrow. This is the Luisa plum. They're a yellow-fleshed plum, and we've had them in the ground for about six or seven years, and this is probably their best crop they've had, uh, which is good. The plums grow really well in Gisborne here, and they're a little bit easier to grow than the rest of the nectarines and peaches, so we're, sort of, tending to go more towards plums. And they eat well off the tree, and the people like them. - Every Saturday morning, the Newmans and their team can be found at the Gisborne Farmers' Market, which they helped to establish 20 years ago. - # Never been one to run... # (STEAM HISSES) - Here you go. Thank you. You want to pick those? Freshly picked Royal Gala apples, just for you. Just help yourself. - We are able to get most of our fruit to the market here. And if there's any excess, it's always a good, uh, avenue to, you know, open it up and sell it here. And also it makes people aware that we are a grower and that we have good produce. - Do you have EFTPOS? - Yes. - Yeah. - And here's your change. Thanks very much. - Thank you. - It's very social. You know, you get to know, uh, so many people that you probably wouldn't, um, know otherwise, you know, in your daily life. So, yeah, half of the time, you are talking or gossiping instead of selling, but it's fun. It's fun. - You eat one of those a day, keep the doctor away. (INDISTINCT CONVERSATIONS) - Back at home, so long as there's fruit to pick, there's more work to be done. - The quiet time for us is middle of winter, which is June. That's when all or a lot of the citruses finished. We try to get a break in June, but the last couple of years, we haven't been able to get away at all. We'd like to travel to a bit. - I'd like to spend a lot more time, just with the grandkids and going overseas, yeah, seeing a bit before we get old. - This is what we've been planning for, for the last two and a half years, is to build a packhouse and to pack apples, and we've got to that goal and achieved it, which is really rewarding. - It's really exciting, and having the staff around, it gives you a realisation that you have accomplished something. And, um, it's really just up to us, from now on, to see that it is a success. - Next time ` - It's quite rare, as a vet, to do work which is all positive. You're bringing people happy news and bringing their dreams to life. - And this couple's also bringing their own dreams to life. - It's really cool, making a plan of what we're going to do and how we're going to improve something of our own. - That's next time on Hyundai Country Calendar.