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The Planting of Kerikeri
The beginning of Kerikeri's horticultural industry in the late 1920's has
been well documented. The vision of journalist and owner of the Northern
Advocate George Alderton to see a citrus industry in Northland, and his
encouragement by E.S. Little, a businessman from China, who wished to bring his
family to settle here, saw the formation of the North Auckland Land Development
Company which surveyed and subdivided an area of suitable land with volcanic
soils for this purpose. Block sizes of about 20 acres were established in the
area from State Highway 10 to Inlet Road and shelters of Eucalyptus and Hakea
Saligna formed a barrier to wind and a microclimate allowing the young citrus
trees to thrive in what had a few years before been an unimaginably barren
landscape. The nature of the small settlement of Kerikeri changed until, by the
mid 1930's, a colourful and cosmopolitan band of settlers from the East made up
a significant proportion of the land owning population. They settled the area
and endeavoured to forge a living from their groves of oranges, lemons and
grapefruit. My father, a King Country dentist, followed his brother, a Timaru
dentist, to Kerikeri and purchased a 21 acre block in Inlet road in 1940a place
in the sun to give the comfort of warmth and the beauty of fast growing gardens
and trees in his retirement. My father-in-law, Bus Emanuel, was a young man
among the China settlers who, with his parents, settled an orchard block in
1927, and was the practical man amongst his peers whose energy and pragmatism
made him an invaluable adviser and innovator amongst the early settlers. By the
outset of war in 1939 the Emanuel orchards made up the largest lemon planting in
the Southern Hemisphere. The neglect of properties as this generation enlisted
and served in the period of 1939-1945, followed by the disastrous droughts of
1945 and 1946, left the orchards in an uneconomic and run-down phase.
I arrived in Kerikeri in 1959 and soon determined to take over the family
property and join in with a community which although only about 500 strong, had
something around 50 associations and interest groups. These centred around the
arts, music and drama, extended to religions and philosophies of unending
diversity, and a strong and vocal Womens Institute of such characters as Hilda
Perham, Violet Benner and Alice Johnston. Joan Hyde wrote short plays and skits
for them to perform and the community reeled with laughter at the risqué humour
and community oversight that was exposed.
At about this time another serious move into horticulture began. Tree
tomatoes had been planted in large numbers by Maurice Kempthorne, Dick van der
Kwaak, Rod McDiarmid, Bus Emanuel and the Riley brothers, and although new
plantings of oranges, mandarins and seminole tangelos were taking place, the
fast yielding tree tomato returned more wealth to the district than citrus had
ever done. Over 1,000 tonnes of tree tomatoes each year were produced and sold
from Kerikeri a processing plant was established in Moerewa and the area was
scented with lime sulphur from the sprayers as growers got down to the serious
business of controlling powdery and downy mildew in their plants.
While Bill Thomson was working at changing the name of tree tomatoes to
tamarillos in the mid 1960's, I became involved in the promotion of a community
irrigation scheme. Growers were becoming more serious in their endeavours to
produce quality citrus from plantings on trifoliate rootstocks. Tangelos were a
new and exciting crop with high returns, navel oranges and lemons were marketed
through the Citrus Marketing Authority which had been set up in 1952 in an
attempt to overcome the poor prices which prevailed during and after the war.
Mandarins, mostly the clementine variety, fetched very high returns and at the
end of the 1960's production from the area's citrus groves was impressive and
returns for fruit were stable. Interest by marmalade manufacturers in New
Zealand grapefruit and a call for grapefruit juice to substitute for orange
juice encouraged significant plantings of this variety in the late 1960's. The
planting of 1000 acres to the north of Kerikeri was planned with feasibility
studies based on a return of four pence per pound. This proposal, although well
researched, did not proceed for a number of reasons. First was the scepticism of
the smaller grower of anything done on this massive scale. Second were doubts
cast on the market accepting the product, given the gathering world preference
for orange juice, and third, there was a growing interest in the juvenile
kiwifruit industry as a much superior money spinner.
The first commercial plantings of kiwifruit were made in 1973
and 1974, and as the industry became more attractive
with gathering demand overseas, there followed a boom period for the development
of kiwifruit orchards during the period 1979 to 1982. Much
of the investment was made by city businessmen encouraged by tax incentives and
capital gains. Kerikeri land was significantly cheaper than the preferred
suitable land in the Bay of Plenty. Provision of water for these plantings
caused many of these investors to create dams, this despite the fact that a
community irrigation facility met with Government approval in 1980. During the
construction of the irrigation scheme, a total of $350
million was estimated as having been spent on horticultural development
in Kerikeri. A research station was developed by DSIR, beginning in 1982, and
replacing the small research block next to the land on which the Kerikeri Club
now sits.
The 1980's saw the overplanting of many of the citrus groves with kiwifruit.
Tamarillo production was also negatively affected in this gold rush. Tamarillos
in fact suffered from the growing prevalence of tobacco mosaic virus, which
severely limited their growth and productivity. By 1987 the inevitable supply
and demand equation for New Zealand kiwifruit saw a collapse in prices, at a
time when the district's production was just beginning to peak. The industry was
set to experience at least five years of difficult times. Growers suffered a
huge decline in their equity in orchard properties and the small orchards were
often subdivided to provide a house section, while the orchards themselves were
sold. This set in train a subdivision of the central Kerikeri area which at the
time was growing in popularity as a residential village. The Local Authority no
longer held a strong approach to the maintenance of economic units of area for
horticulture, but rather took the more expedient view of their ratepayers. What
had been considered the valuable land resource of Kerikeri deep friable loams
lost ground to housing development.
In the mid 1980's a recognition of the possibility of mandarin production for
export to Asia encouraged the development of a large orchard in the area of
Kapiro Road. A few years later a similarly large planting of
lemons took place, again with a view to export. The district's kiwifruit
production diminished and the famous Kerikeri orange lost ground as a result of
the free flow of cheap Australian oranges under the rapidly changing trade
patterns between the two countries. New Zealand grapefruit was no longer catered
for by a processing plant and had a very limited market as a fresh fruit.
Seminole tangelos had contracted a fungal disease which, with the move against
chemical sprays, was impossible to counter. This meant that this popular variety
of the 1960's was no longer an economic crop in the 1990's.
The writer's vision of horticulture in Kerikeri as we approach the
next century, is of a continuation of the export focus at the expense of
local market supply and a new professionalism being applied in the production of
citrus and subtropical fruits for export. Asian prosperity will open up new
opportunities and challenges to Kerikeri's horticultural community and an era of
prosperity such as has not been known since the 1970's, should
follow.
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