The South African Gold kiwifruit season looks very promising this year, as per Peter Nicholson from Roselands Farm who cultivates Gold Kiwifruit throughout the Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal and is also an investor of the Intellectual Property of both the Sunveld (formerly Skelton) as in addition to TopGold. TopGold varieties.
“After an extremely challenging couple of years since planting in 2013, we’re beginning to gain momentum with our new orchards, and varieties entering the market with great yields, and high excellent fruits. Through the years we’ve learned valuable lessons regarding how to produce this extremely complex fruits throughout South Africa,” said Pete, “and are passing these valuable lessons to our aspiring growers via an education program and also offering technical assistance. There’s no room to make mistakes when growing the gold-kiwi and our support will allow our growers to achieve success.”
“I consider this to be one of the biggest and most thrilling agricultural opportunities available in the world today,” says Peter. ” There is an completely open period of time for exports to this region of the Northern Hemisphere with only around 250 hectares of land currently being planted on the continent of South Africa of this high yielding, premium superfruit and more than more than a decade of knowledge in our hands.”
The previous year, South Africa as a total exported less than 1200 tonnes of kiwifruit however this year, with the new orchards being set to start production, estimates are 1500 tonnes. This is expected to grow significantly year over year.
“Last year, we had some test shipments of our brand new kind of Cape Gold (H14) were made through our marketing company (KiwiConnection) in Asia and were popular by the markets of Hong Kong and Singapore,” Peter says. Peter. “Cape Gold is an enormous fruit, and is particularly interesting because of the look and appearance the fruit as like Horth16A and KiwiConnection is expected to ship the first commercial quantities to their Asian and European markets in the coming season.”
An exciting new development is that commercial plantations of TopGold started in 2022. the first fruits will export by 2025. In the present, the main market of South African kiwifruit is Europe because the time of this South African season falls into the period between European production as well as the arrival of New Season kiwifruit imported from New Zealand.
“We believe that this window will likely be bigger next year because of the issues that are affecting shipping via canals like the Red Sea and Suez canal and also The Panama Canal is also experiencing delays because of the drought, which has added an extra week of transit time.”
The the first South African kiwifruit will be picked next month, at early February, and continue until the end of March. Exporters will have ample time to ship the fruit into Europe ahead of the initial arrivals coming from New Zealand.
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Peter Nicholson
Tel: +27 82 457 1614
Email: pete@roselands.co.za
Pieter De Jongh
Tel: +27 82 958 6699
Pieter.deJongh@freshworld.co.za