A decision to move back to her hometown and plant avocados four years ago has seen Te Puke’s Libby McKenzie go on a big growth journey, and as Carly Gibbs discovers, it’s been one of hard work and lessons learned along the way.
When Libby McKenzie moved back to her home district of Pongakawa, near Te Puke, from Christchurch in 2019, she felt happy about her decision to plant avocados over kiwifruit.
Four years on, in what’s becoming an oversaturated market with suffering export returns, she’s unsure whether that was the right call but is persevering optimistically.
Libby and her husband Lachlan “Lachie” planted 669 Hass avocado trees on 3ha of bare land that they bought off Libby’s parents Keith and Caroline Boyle, who live adjacent to the property on their Maniatutu Road dairy farm. The Boyle’s also own a green kiwifruit orchard that they lease, and three blocks of avocados.
Newbies Libby and Lachie will harvest their second-ever avocado crop this year, which at the time of print, looked to be up on last year but “light”. “Certainly, our young avocados aren’t looking as good as I would have liked. Last year we did about eight bins, and this year we’ll do about 15,” Libby predicts.
She puts the gradual increase down to poor flowering, thanks to wet, cloudy conditions. And the couple has chosen not to export their crop due to compliance and fee costs, and their low number of trays.
“It just doesn’t make it economic until we can get a few more bins,” Libby says. When they bought their land, it was covered in lucerne that had been cropped for her parents' dairy stock. They toyed with the idea of planting kiwifruit on it, but when comparing set-up costs, they opted for avocados, knowing they still needed to buy a house.
It took a year to get two power poles removed from the site due to a “long and difficult” process with Powerco. And during this time, they’d already planted a shelter belt. Then they partially recontoured; resowed; marked the block out; and put irrigation and a bore in. “By the time we planted the trees, it was late in the season - December 2019,” she recalls.
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