—story by Kate Prengaman
—photos by TJ Mullinax and Kate Prengaman

Under the hot South African sun, quick cooling is critical to protect the quality of plums that face a monthlong journey to reach consumers in Europe.
Fruit2U Packers, a stone fruit, table grape and citrus packer, recently installed solar panels so the packing house can keep the power on during South Africa’s frequent power outages, known as load sharing.
“I’ve measured plums coming in as high as 52 degrees (Celsius),” said Marius Voigt, the packing house operations manager. That’s about 125 degrees Fahrenheit, or as Voigt put it, “half-cooked.”

The driving forces behind changes like these in South Africa’s orchards — the need to mitigate climate stresses and produce consistent crops of top-quality fruit — will feel familiar to growers across the globe.
But the context in which South African growers operate creates many differences. Low labor costs allow for the kinds of detailed training and pruning that North American growers can now only dream of. Electricity is inconsistent and expensive. Water is scarce. The lack of winter chill creates a reliance on chemistries, but primary export markets are increasingly restrictive. And South Africa’s young democracy is just 30 years old: While much has changed since the end of apartheid, profound racial and economic inequalities persist.
All this made for a fascinating tour of the Western Cape, where unique growing regions are tucked into every valley between a seeming maze of mountains: citrus and table grapes that give way to plums, nectarines and wine grapes in the warmer regions, while apples and pears can be found where elevation offers at least a little winter chill.
In December, the International Fruit Tree Association visited the fruit-focused region and settled in at a home base in Stellenbosch, a college town with Dutch roots so strong visitors might have felt they’d been transported to the cobblestone streets of Europe. Each day, visitors traveled over one mountain pass or another to a different microclimate to visit with a grower trying to optimize production.

South African pome and stone fruit production is a $1 billion industry, made up of 1,100 growers and 68,000 on-farm workers who produce some 2 million metric tons of fruit across 710 varieties that are eaten in 86 different countries, said Mariette Kotze, the manager of industry support services for Hortgro, the assessment-funded grower association for pome and stone fruit growers.
With over 80 percent of production exported, “we have to take a global view,” she said.
Export experts
Every South African orchard aims for export-quality fruit, and growers primarily focus on trying to get more of the crop into those top grades each season. The relatively weak South African rand operates in their favor in the export markets they supply, as well.
“Our export is really what drives profitability in South Africa, so we want to maximize the fruit that goes into export packs,” said Hannes Laubscher of United Export.

Export goals have largely driven the widespread adoption of netting to reduce sunburn on pome fruit and sun and wind damage to stone fruit.
“Our open orchards, 60 percent go export. These netted orchards, it’s 90 percent, so it really changes your profitability,” Laubscher said when the tour visited a fourth-leaf block of high-density nectarines at Oudewagendrift Farm. The trees are planted in an inline V system that allows the trellis posts to hold up the nets.
Meanwhile, catering to global tastes drives cultivar change. Consumers in the U.K. now want flat, or donut, peaches, and families in the Middle East want small, snack-sized apples. For pears, the primary market for traditional cultivars has been in the EU, but there is growing demand in Asia and the Middle East for blush pears that South Africa’s producers are now planting to supply.
“Pears are making us more per hectare than apples,” said Willie Kotze, technical director for Dutoit Agri, when the tour visited a block of Cape Rose, a blush cultivar marketed as Cheeky.
Grower Justin Mudge, who owns Chiltern Farms in the pome-fruit-heavy Vyeboom Valley, took the group to a sixth-leaf block of Forelle planted on BA 29, a precocious quince rootstock that allowed the farm to plant at a 1-meter tree spacing and get into production much more quickly.

“We hope to get 60 to 70 tonnes per hectare of high-quality fruit here,” Mudge said, adding that he was glad he’d overruled his father’s advice against investing in Forelle. (That translates to 60 to 70 bins per acre, assuming 900-pound bins.)
“I was opposed, but two things changed: the rootstock and the market,” said his father, Nigel Mudge, defending his original position that European consumers weren’t excited about Forelle. “With the rootstock change, we went from eight to nine years to market to four or five. And it’s a beautiful pear.”
A totally different take on labor
Unemployment in South Africa hovers near 30 percent and the agricultural minimum wage is $1.50 an hour, creating an entirely different labor context than what’s typical for the growers on the IFTA tour.
“Mechanization is not high on the agenda in South Africa because we have an ethical responsibility to create jobs on farms,” said Karen Theron, professor emeritus at Stellenbosch University.
This philosophy on labor shined from orchard to packing house. Take Fruit2U Packers in Wellington, which combines state-of-the-art sizing and grading technology, forced-air cooling chambers and innovative, moveable pallet storage racks to create efficiencies in an immense cold room, with all packing done by hand.
“It’s important to Mr. LeRoux (the owner) to be a job creator,” Voigt said, adding that he didn’t want to invest in job-eliminating technology during a recent packing line renovation, just quality-improving technology.
In the orchards, many labor-intensive tasks are necessary to create productive, efficient trees in their challenging climate, said Kotze of Dutoit. That holds true regardless of the rootstocks; apples on vigorous roots require a lot of taming to produce a consistent, well-colored crop, while young orchards on dwarfing rootstocks need training and, often, painstaking application of scoring and MaxCel (6-benzyladenine) to fill their space.

“It’s manipulation, manipulation, manipulation to get a weak tree to fill space and into production,” he said in a block of BigBucks Gala, a popular and fully red South African sport planted on M.9 Nic 29 with 1.25-meter in-row spacing and 3.5-meter rows. (That’s approximately a 12-foot row and a 4-foot tree spacing, for those following along in the U.S.)
Kotze detailed the labor inputs for a mature block in terms of worker-days per hectare, or about two and a half acres: 20 to 30 worker-days per hectare for pruning, 25 to 30 for thinning, five for putting out the netting, six for the reflective material and, for harvest, he estimates about three bins per worker per day. But the real eye-catching statistic was tree training in the second leaf: 150 to 200 worker-days.
“About 35 to 40 percent of our production cost is labor, so we can afford to spend that to get the system to work,” he said.
Vigor, a virtue and a vice
Most of South Africa’s 17,500 hectares of apples (that’s 42,000 acres) still grow on semidwarfing rootstocks, such as M.7 and MM.109. Growers generally need more vigor to compensate for poor soils and the lack of winter chill.
“We have a lot of challenges to match the rootstock to the scion to the site,” Kotze said.
The vigorous, traditional orchards set up a battle between sunburn and color, said Graeme Krige, general manager for consulting firm Fruitmax Agri who hosted the visit at Oewerzicht Farm in Greyton, on the edge of climate suitability for apples.
He took the group to a typical 10-year-old orchard, Cripps Red planted on MM.109 at 1.5-meter in-row spacing. The trees used to lose 30 to 40 percent of the crop to sunburn, so they began to use shade netting. The netting reduced sunburn but also color, so now they do leaf removal by hand to encourage color.

The productive block was carrying 115 metric tons per hectare this season and harvested 156 last year.
That’s equivalent to 156 bins per acre. Production figures frequently seemed high to tour attendees, but that’s because South African production targets differ.
“You like your apples big, and we grow them small,” Mudge said, adding that by serving so many export markets, South African growers can find the right homes for different grades of fruit.
Big trees grow lots of apples, yes, but they grow more inconsistent crops in terms of quality, Kotze said. Progressive growers are moving to higher densities and more precocious rootstocks, but the risk of sunburn increases in that transition.
“Planting on a dwarfing rootstock is automatically planting with netting,” he said.

Looking ahead
Growers all acknowledged that the future is bringing more climate challenges and rising labor costs.
“We can’t plant the orchard now with the idea that five or 10 years from now, it will remain affordable,” Krige said.
Experiments are underway. The tour saw new formal plantings on dwarfing Geneva rootstocks at Dutoit, platform-friendly V-trellis systems on semivigorous roots in rocky soil at Oewerzicht, and 1-meter by 3-meter plantings on M.9 roots at Chiltern (that’s a 3-foot by 12-foot spacing).
“The labor is minimal on those blocks, versus the big trees of ours that we have to spend a lot of time cutting and on detail work,” Johann Bayer, a farm manager a Chiltern, said of the M.9 orchards.
They are still learning how to farm in this “new paradigm,” as Mudge called it, but one thing is abundantly clear: “The solution is not using vigor to shade apples — that’s been our modus operandi,” he said.
For more on how South African growers are adapting their horticulture for netted orchards and transitioning to dwarfing apple rootstocks under stressful climate conditions, stay tuned for our next issue. •
Editor’s note: This story has been updated from the original print version to correctly identify Graeme Krige’s title as general manager of Fruitmax Agri, a consulting firm that works with Oewerzicht Farm and other grower-shareholders in the Two-A-Day Group. The labor inputs shared by Willie Kotze, technical manager for Dutoit Agri, have also been updated. Good Fruit Grower regrets the errors.
Five farms, five climates

1. Sandrivier Farm in Wellington
This orchard, owned by the Le Roux Group, features over 200 hectares of stone fruit, predominantly plums trained in a formal system. So far, 65 hectares are covered with netting, and more is planned, said Stephan Strauss, the orchard manager. The Fruit2U Packers warehouse is also located here, which handles stone fruit and table grapes from the company’s farms and, in the offseason, citrus for outside growers.
2. Kromfontein and Lindeshof Farms in the Koue Bokkeveld
These two Dutoit Agri farms, with a combined 1,000 hectares, sit in one of the country’s coolest growing regions and, thanks to higher elevation, are best suited for apples, pears and the company’s new cherry orchards. The region gets between 1,000 and 1,500 chill hours, according to technical director Willie Kotze, but has weaker soils that make it more difficult to adopt dwarfing rootstocks. “I’ve seen M.9 in Europe be more vigorous than M.7 in our climate,” he said. The remote orchard complex includes worker housing and a school. Dutoit, one of South Africa’s largest family-owned fruit companies, has farms in several growing regions, comprising some 5,000 hectares.
3. Chiltern Farms in the Vyeboom Valley
Chiltern Farms comprises 250 hectares of apples and pears, along with 30 hectares of container-grown blueberries, at several farm properties around the Vyeboom Valley, which is part of a large area known for pome fruit production. The region gets about 800 chill hours and features a network of reservoirs, with the larger ones run by an irrigation district and the smaller ones on-farm capturing winter rainfall for summer irrigation. Owner Justin Mudge said that in recent years, including the drought of 2018, the farm has benefitted from the fact that his father and grandfather were engineers. The company also packs and markets, with its partners, for 17 other area farmers.
4. Oewerzicht Farm in Greyton
At this warm location that pushes the climatic limits of pome fruit, Oewerzicht features 55 hectares of apples and 20 hectares of pears. The fruit are packed and marketed by the Two-A-Day Group, a grower-owned cooperative based in the Elgin district that handles 110,000 metric tons of apples and 26,500 tons of pears annually. Oewerzicht farm gets 200 to 300 chill units a year, according to Graeme Krige, technical director for the Two-A-Day Group, and relies heavily on rest-breaking agents. The farm hosts several cooperative and industry trials of varieties and rootstocks.
5. Oudewagendrift Farm in the Nuy Valley
The warm Nuy Valley is best suited for stone fruit, so this farm features 30 hectares of plums and 60 of peaches and nectarines, including 24 hectares under netting, as well as a dairy operation. Tour host and owner Wilhelm Naudé said the region gets about 220 chill units annually, but modern genetics allow him to have a harvest season that runs from the beginning of October through the end of March.
—K. Prengaman
Beat bruising
Another way to ensure more fruit makes export grade and stays out of the juice market: prevent bruising in the bins as they are hauled along bumpy orchard roads. IFTA tour attendees took several rides in bin trains — that’s also a common mode of transport for workers in the region — and learned firsthand how rough the ride can be.
During the tour’s visit to Dutoit, the company had on display two local innovations that help protect fruit during transport.
The first, which Willie Kotze said would make a huge improvement for U.S. Honeycrisp growers, is a foam bin liner called FruitGuard, made by Prima Defensio of South Africa. The weave design accommodates both drenching and the airflow needed for cold storage, and he’s found that the liners last him three seasons on average. The liners cost $1 each.

Second was a new bin trailer from Red Ant Agricultural Solutions, a South African equipment manufacturer, that featured air suspension “pillows” on each wheel to cushion the ride. The trailers also include a datalogger that records acceleration and speed, so that managers can troubleshoot problem spots or offer employees additional training if needed, said Gys du Toit, manager for Dutoit’s Western Cape operations.
—K. Prengaman
Why growers in warm regions count chill
At every orchard the IFTA visited, growers shared the location’s typical chill units.
While stone fruit growers have low-chill adapted cultivars to choose from, pome fruit trees especially need winter cold to synchronize their growth for the next year, said Wiehann Steyn, Hortgro’s science director and IFTA’s informal tour director.
That’s something growers in Northern growing regions with plenty of winter get to take completely for granted — for now. Many South African growers use the Utah model, developed in the 1970s, which adds chill units for cold and cool conditions but then subtracts from the total when warmer conditions occur. Alternative approaches to calculating chill have been developed in other regions as well.
Rest-breaking agents Dormex (hydrogen cyanamide) and oil are used to jolt the trees awake, but the amount required varies with the severity of chill deprivation. At Oewerzicht Farm, located at the lower limit of climate suitability for apples, there were lingering blossoms on the trees that carried a full load of fruit, a sign that even a heavy dose of rest-breaking agents hadn’t quite delivered synchronized growth.
“If we lost rest-breaking products, there is no way we’d be able to grow apples here,” Steyn said.
—K. Prengaman
Planar plums, flat peaches
Exporting stone fruit around the world is no small feat — fruit must be picked at the optimum time to finish ripening on its journey. But the logistics of export shipping have become more expensive and less predictable.
“It used to take three weeks to get to Europe and the U.K. Now it takes 35 to 40 days, which increases the risks for growers,” said Wilhelm Naudé, owner of Oudewagendrift Farm in the Nuy Valley.
Those risks that lie outside their control increasingly have growers investing more in what they can control: protective netting over orchards and labor-intensive orchard management.
Hannes Laubscher, the technical director for United Exports, Oudewagendrift’s packing and sales partner, detailed the standard canopy management work for nectarines grown in their preferred inline V system. Trees are planted with a 1.5- or 2-meter tree spacing, depending on the variety, and 4-meter rows, creating a single-plane canopy with no formal training. The trellis posts also hold up the permanent nets.

“You need to renew the tree so much more on peaches and nectarines, so we don’t like a formal V,” he said.
To set the appropriate crop load in the high-density system, they clip back shoots to reduce flowers and keep the renewal closer to the trunk. Then, they do a fruit thinning pass and, closer to harvest, a final cosmetic thin.
That’s all by hand. Same for the series of three summer pruning passes to get light into the canopy.
“We don’t do anything mechanical. We’ve tested the Darwin (blossom thinner) here and it can work, but South African growers still like everything neat,” Laubscher said.
The same attention to detail showed in formally trained plum orchards at Sandrivier Estate in Wellington. The trees were planted on Marianna rootstock on berms, which makes the most of the limited topsoil and reduces the challenges from winter rains, according to farm manager Stephan Strauss.

The sixth-leaf trees, planted at 3 meters with 2-meter in-row spacing, were trained to alternating sides of a nine-wire V-trellis, with 20 centimeters between each wire. That gives each tree 18 meters of bearing space, Strauss said.
“With a more informal system, thinning was more difficult, but here you can make it easier to direct thinning,” he said. “It’s expensive in the beginning, but it lasts 10 to 15 years.”
Yes, he can renew the fruiting wood, but stone fruit cultivars often fall out of favor in 15 or so years.
Strauss’s plums also feature fixed shade nets and wind-protection walls. While the V-trellis system requires additional posts to hold up the nets, they gain more production from the V-trellis creating two fruiting walls, he said.
Once they’ve grown export-quality stone fruit, companies then must protect that quality by rapidly cooling the fruit.
At the Fruit2U Packers warehouse, located on the Sandrivier Estate, fruit is hydrocooled immediately after harvest and then packed immediately or stored at 12 degrees Celsius (about 54 degrees Fahrenheit) until it can be packed. Temperature matters, because at 10 C or below, they end up with condensation, said packing house manager Marius Voigt.
After packing, pallets of fruit are sent to forced-air cooling chambers that can each store 20 or 36 pallets. The chambers feature fans on top, which suck out the hot air, cool it, and then the cool air flows down along the sides of the chambers to cool the fruit.
“We want to cool it down as soon as possible, so we need to force the air through it,” Voigt said.
To further protect the cold chain, pallets of fruit then wait in a newly renovated cold storage room with movable racks until the weekend, so they can send fruit to the port of Cape Town when there is less traffic.
—K. Prengaman
Leave A Comment