After the menace of vine disease Psa the European kiwifruit sector was able to recover to hit record volumes last year, according to Alessandro Fornari of Italian marketer Jingold. But with this uptick in volume has come lower grower returns, sparking a need for diversification. At www.freshfruitportal.com we caught up with the executive to discuss three new variety introductions and his thoughts on the upcoming season.
“The good news is the growers in Italy, like elsewhere, have achieved a situation where they are living with the Psa and they are able to recover their production,” says Fornari.
“For these reasons in the last three years our program has been recovering the production we lost from Psa, and actually in 2015 we had a our highest production in terms of volume of Jingold kiwifruit.
“We reached around 80,000 [metric] tons (MT) of kiwifruit in Italy, and 3,000MT of production in Chile. This shows that we’re continuously increasing production.”
But this recuperation has not just been by a stroke of luck, with orchard management and prevention procedures going a long way to making cultivation viable once more; that is, if prices can justify the cost.
Fornari says many growers who planted Hayward in the last couple of years are grafting over to new varieties with the hope of getting a price premium, and Jingold is one of a few companies that can bring something new to the table.
The group is known for its Jingold brand often associated with the gold Jintao variety for which it holds the exclusive rights, but more recently there has been a strategy shift to market many different cultivars under the same “Jingold” name.
“Then we make a segmentation of the brand with a small description, with the color and description of the variety,” he says.
Since the spring of 2015 the group has introduced three new kiwifruit varieties it has licensed from the Wuhan Institute of Botany in China, with expectations the plantations will yield their first fruit in 2017.
The first is a green variety “Z5Z6”, which is a “green variety with a very high sugar level and dry matter”, while the second is the “Oriental Red” – known in Chinese as “Donghong” – which is yellow-fleshed with a red core.
But out of the 45 hectares dedicated to the trial, the most dominant is the third variety Jinyen, which is a larger yellow-fleshed kiwifruit that is very similar to Jintao apart from a few technical aspects of orchard management.
“We selected this variety to have more distribution on the bigger sizes, integrating the production of this variety Jinyen next to the production of Jintao.
“It is not a policy of changing or moving to a new gold variety. This is something growers do not always completely understand – we are not leaving the Jintao variety, but integrating to have a wider range of size available and to also have two different options for a grower.”
He says the initial planting program is designed to test the fruit in a wider range of climate conditions and soil, while also using the material as mother plants for the reproduction of plants for future orchards.
“Actually we got a very good response from the growers so we had more planting demand than our capability to supply new plants, so in fact the initial program we agreed was 35 hectares but we had to expand to 45 hectares,” Fornari says.
“We could have done more but there is not the potential for making the new plants. We expect to have a big increase in the next couple of years as the mother plants become adults, and we can collect some wood to make the top grafting works.”
How does the weather bode for the 2016 crop?
Fornari says it is too early to discuss matters of quality and size for the upcoming kiwifruit crop, but there is one important production factor that relates to weather.
“The key point this year is that the central and southern parts of Italy got a very warm winter and this crossed also with the high production of those areas in the previous year, will lead probably to a decrease in the volumes of production of kiwifruit in those areas,” he says.
“There was a normal climate condition during summer so it was not very hot like the previous year and that should benefit the quality of the fruit – usually the extremes in climate are not good for the kiwifruit.
“In the north we expect still the same production of last year, or it could be more or less depending on the area. Let’s just say the winter condition in the north has been cold enough to lead to a normal production, whereas in the south a lack of cold units will lead to a decrease in the volumes.”
As an industry, Fornari says growers will need to continue to strengthen quality to adapt to higher production and opportunities in China.
“We are facing a continuously increasing volume of kiwifruit worldwide,” he says.
“Especially in the Northern Hemisphere there will be and there is big growth of China, which is also a good market for the European kiwifruit, so we have to stay focused on quality.”
The break-up of the Kiwifruit of Italy consortium
Fornari was previously the president of the consortium ‘Kiwifruit of Italy’, but he says the management has changed since it became part of the Origine Group in the second half of last year.
“The kiwifruit consortium has in fact changed the management, the name and the objective of the company and it is now a completely new company. It is not working any more I would say,” he says.
“It became part of Origin Group, which is a group of different exporters that joined together to make some marketing together and they merged the remaining kiwifruit from the Italian Kiwifruit Consortium into the new company.
“Jingold went out of that company so we are not involved in the activities.”
Source: FreshFruitPortal
