Australia’s mango season is heating up with about 500,000 trays being picked and packed this week.
The current crop forecast has Australia on track to produce more than 9 million trays this season, which is up on last year, but growers are facing plenty of challenges to get fruit to market.
The Darwin region keeps getting rain, which is delaying the harvest and creating some quality issues.
“I think I’ll have to invest in a boat soon,” grower Han Shiong Siah said.
“The rain occurring this early has been very unusual for us, we’ve never had this amount of rain this early in the season.”
Mr Siah said magpie geese and other birds had also descended onto mango crops much earlier this year.
“We’re currently employing three people to sit on three quad bikes to chase magpie geese all day long, they’ve been pretty bad,” he said.
Fruit blown off trees
One severe storm this month, which saw the Darwin Airport record wind speeds of 137 kilometres per hour, swept across several mango orchards, blowing a lot of fruit off trees.
“We probably lost about 30 per cent of our remaining crop in that storm,” grower Leo Skliros said.
“Some plantations lost more than 60 per cent of their crop … I’d say about 150,000 trays of mangoes in this area just fell to the ground.”
Nearby at the Berry Springs packing shed, manager Tim Elliott said the mango season always produced plenty of “madness”.
“We had a huge flowering, but it hasn’t ended up a huge crop and we’re probably down about 30 per cent on a good season [around Darwin],” he said.
“We’re battling storms and finding workers is a challenge, but the fruit getting picked are full and juicy.”
Good money for quality
Money for quality fruit remains good for farmers, with first-grade Kensington Pride mangoes fetching around $45 a tray.
The crop forecast suggests the national harvest will peak towards the end of November and there will be a few weeks of overlap between the Northern Territory and Queensland harvests, which could put pressure on prices.
Some early fruit has already been picked in WA’s Ord Valley and in Queensland’s Bowen region.