Riverina Almonds

On the outskirts of Blenheim, Graham Farnell and Gill Smith have devoted a lot of their time and energy for the last 20 years to growing almonds. The nuts are a big crop in California and parts of Australia and to their knowledge they’re the first in New Zealand to establish the crop on a commercial scale.

The couple went looking for a crop to grow back in the late 1980s but they wanted to try something different.   Graham says they were pretty keen to grow something no one else was growing in the area.   At that stage grapes were becoming established.

They planted about 500 trees initially and assessed them for a while to see if they could produce a crop that was viable. They gradually expanded up to 2000 trees.

In the early days the crop was harvested by hand by shaking or hammering the tree to get the mature nuts to drop. Like most of the other technology on the farm Graham has developed home built solutions. He came up with a mechanical harvestor back in 2004 – it was cobbled together from bits and pieces he had lying around the orchard and workshop. Graham says he and Gill could never have been able to afford the close to half million dollars it would have cost to import a harvest machine which would have sat in a garage for 11 months of th year.

Simply finding trees that would crop well and were suited to the area took years of trials. When they first started, Gill went to the supermarket to source almonds to propagate. She had no success and believes they’d been irradiated or treated in some way to stop them from growing.

As the crop’s increased, they’ve had to streamline the processing.

Graham has also designed and built the processing gear. The nuts are shaken off the tree whole with a hull, shell and kernel inside. They then go through a series of serrated rollers to crack the shells and remove the unwanted hulls.

Gill says when they first started, processing was long and tedious but Graham’s knack with machinery has streamlined the process.

Almonds are very vulnerable to frost so Graham also put his skills to use in designing a frost fighting machine to protect the crop during winter. The mobile helicopter started life as a hedge trimmer. The blades keep the warmer air circulating and the frost at bay. Frost sensors in the orchard and an alarm in the house also keep them on alert.

Graham and Gill say they’re great believers in the farmers market philosophy. They like the fact that there’s no middle man – the customer talks to the producer and they get feedback directly. Graham also says the integrity of the market is very important as the product has to be sold by the grower.