Avocado Conversion | Valencia Orchard
The Casey family are moderate sized orchardists with over 25 canopy hectares of Hayward (Green), at a mid to high altitude in Te Puke and have been customers of KOS for over 8 seasons. When they wanted to convert their avocado block to kiwifruit (in this case they were going to grow G3 (Gold)) they got us in to come up with a plan and design to achieve this goal.
Removing avocado orchards and converting to kiwifruit increases the chance of better income for the land. Orchards are typically smaller plots of land/ lifestyle blocks that are not conducive to farming stock (sheep or cattle) that yield a decent income. Horticulture, particularly kiwifruit, is a viable option.
We designed the structure to the same specs as the existing kiwifruit structures to make for overall easier management for contractors ie. pruning and spraying without compromising integrity to the overall structure. The orchard layout was GPS marked to a grid pattern of 10 rows by 10 bays. Following mark out, we started with end assemblies and ground wires to ensure evenly spaced rows across the block. The crew could then individually mark out and ram all the internal posts and hang the leader and irrigation wires.
KOS installed under-vine wind protection to save the seedlings and new shoots from the south westerly we see in BOP. We installed all the vine supporting parts of our structures - beam, wires and end cables. Our crop protection contractor then completed the 6.2m artificial wind break throughout the block. After planting KOS re-tensioned all the canopy wires and made sure they were spaced evenly down the lengths of the rows and secured nicely to the steel pergola.
Finally, we removed and recycled all unused materials then provided a handover to the grower and management to work their magic and grow high quality New Zealand Gold kiwifruit.
The construction and planting of this orchard was completed in 2023 and in 2025 they are expecting their first full crop with predictions of 18,000 export trays per hectare.
