Visiting orchard production facilities of three diverse enterprises during the afternoon

Rockit Apple 

Rockit Apple is a business that eats, sleeps and breathes innovation in the apple industry. Famous for its development of a new category of apple snack fruit, assembled around production and marketing innovations exploiting a very high quality but tiny apple fruit, which originated as an unusual outcome within the Plant & Food Research Ltd apple breeding programme.

T&G Global

One of the largest New Zealand apple production companies (in addition to many other horticultural products), whose business has heavily invested in a suite of licensed proprietary cultivars, including their international production of across regions in several continents. T&G Global have an ongoing programme of evaluation of new opportunities for innovation in orchard production systems towards greater efficiency, quality and productivity.

Camelot Orchards

Stewart Burns operates an extensive stonefruit and apple orcharding business, heavily focused on a diversity of stonefruit types. Keeping a keen eye on innovations occurring in the pome fruits, he has adapted concepts from new apple production ideas into practical manifestations applied across peach, nectarine and plum planting systems. With stonefruit his focus is heavily towards opportunities for reduced/efficient labour requirements whilst providing canopy conditions for optimum fruit development and always adapting towards greater mechanisation.