NZ Fresh Cuts

A great deal of the packaged baby leaf vegetables sold in supermarkets comes from NZ Fresh Cuts, an Auckland based business which continuously crops its land, and as a result, has to take the very best care of it to ensure sustainable production.

Chris Butler, NZ Fresh Cuts farm operations manager has worked for the company for four years. He has been growing vegetables for the past 20 years, including in Gisborne. He is very focused on looking after soils sustainably.

NZ Fresh Cuts is constantly cropping for baby leaf production at its two South Auckland farms.

In winter crops take up to 60 days to harvest, but in summer they zoom along only taking 14 days.

So on average there are 100 sowings of all their varieties lettuce, mustards, spinach, mesclun and carrots each year.

They harvest six days a week each week of the year from their Mangere and Rangiriri farms.

This regime is tough work on their soils, which at Rangiriri is a light sandy pumice and at Mangere is a sticky volcanic clay.

Both suffer from the constant cultivation with problems such as compaction, so Chris has decided to move to a controlled traffic system with semi-permanent raised beds.

This means the wheels on the tractors are running down the same lines, only compacting a small part of the paddock. This reduces damage to the beds where the crops are grown, and means less fuel and fertiliser is used.

They are also now running trials as part of LandWISEs advanced farming system project to compare controlled traffic with conventional cultivation.

Other problems with compaction are more leaching and more surface run-off, leading to fertiliser loss. They hope there will be better water infiltration and a lower cost of irrigation.

Its a wet place Auckland, and last winter it rained 130 out of 150 days. That makes it difficult to get work done, and Chris keeps an eagle eye on weather forecasts.

He looks at lots of different forecasts but his favourite is MSNs Metservice site which has three day forecasts.

He says the Auckland forecast is 90-95% accurate on predicting rainfalls which is important when there is only a two hour windowof drying time after putting a spray on.

The rain also limits their business, which makes moving to controlled traffic all the more important, as it speeds up cultivation practices.

In the last year theyve put GPS into two tractors, and now they also use larger tractors which can work up three beds at once instead of one.

Chris says fuel savings on bed preparation alone are around 58%.

At the Mangere farm controlled traffic is expected to reduce the number of passes significantly. Using the triple beds and having them raised and semi-permanent has cut the passes needed to prepare the beds down from six to two.

The other benefit of trials here is that because of the short rotations, the effects of any changes can be measured quickly, rather than waiting for a whole season for a crop to grow and be harvested.

NZ Fresh Cuts has the only Morrish harvester in NZ. Imported from the UK, the self propelled $130,000 harvester is at the top end of the market, delivering a really high quality product. It cuts the crop with a bandsaw, harvesting one 2m wide bed at a time.

The good thing about it is that the crop is cut out in front of the machine, so there are no contamination issues compared with normal harvesting, where the tractor drives over the crop first.

Harvesting is six days a week from a start in summer at 6am and through to about 9am. Then its all taken to the factory for vacuum chilling, washing, drying, bagging and dispatch.

Eight to 10 people work on each farm, with 90 at the factory.

Most of the crop is sold pre-packaged to supermarkets, and a bit is exported to Hong Kong.

There are quite a few marketing arms to the company, including Farmer Bills which markets cut and peeled carrots, Dashboard Diner which makes ready to eat salads, and Sun Sprout.

In Nelson theres a 20ha farm to produce baby leaf veggies for the South Island. Food safety is their main issue, and they are very hot on traceability.

Fresh Cuts is now certified with carboNZero through Landcare Research. It has measured its greenhouse gas emissions and committing to reducing them.

We have a few targets we have to meet, and we are trying to lower our emissions with lower water and fertiliser use.