Justin Mudge's pioneering years in the nascent South African blueberry industry go back thirty years and culminated in him chairing the industry body BerriesZA for five years. He rose to prominence during the weeks-long port strike of 2022 when he took to the general media to decry the destruction of that season's crop, rotting away inside trucks on blocked roads.
He's still nursing the scars from leading the charge on blueberries, from those heady years when "it just had to be round and it had to be blue" because so few farms were growing it, to the situation now faced by blueberry farmers in the Western Cape whose crop feeds into an already saturated market.
After stepping down at BerriesZA, Justin Mudge has made the Vyeboom fruit farm where he grew up with his brother Wayne Mudge (CEO of Cape Five Exports) the sole focus of his attention.
He candidly says that after losses of a million euros each year for three consecutive years – none worse than the calamitous season of 2022 – they will not be investing further into blueberries. Their last good year was 2019.
There will be casualties in the South African blueberry industry and they are likely to be of that number, he says. He is philosophical about it but the whole experience has left him sceptical of the way blueberries are delimited by the variety clubs who assume totalitarian control over the marketing. "If you look at other fruit industries, none of them are delimited to that extent."
It is possible to be profitable with blueberries in Europe but with the caveat: "You need to be outside the big supply window. If the majority of your fruit is in that oversupply window as is the case for the Western Cape, I can potentially be operationally profitable but there's no motivation for continued investment and expansion in our specific circumstances."
He considers the blueberry industry very immature relative to other kinds of fruit, in the way it stratifies and restricts, and it's a view he says is shared by Mario Steta, chairperson of the International Blueberry Organisation. Mudge is emphatic: he will never again agree to conditions that excessively constrain him, all the while regardless of whether the promises of amazing returns on limitless consumption are realised.
Chiltern Farms, established in 1954 in Vyeboom, Western Cape, to grow and pack fruit
Top fruit better employs Chiltern's resources than blueberries
"We've reached the limit of profitability on blueberries. We have to look at our natural resources, like water. It has to be deployed to best effect." And the best use to which they can put their land, he believes, is in its traditional crops of apples and pears.
Mudge expects a regular top fruit season, tranquil from a demand and pricing perspective and with no clearly disadvantageous or advantageous factors now evident. "I'm pretty confident that apples and pears are in a very good position and will continue to stand on its feet," he says. "We embarked on our own commercialization journey in 2024 for the growers packing their fruit at Chiltern," he says. "Lessons have been learned and we are confident that we will build on the successes we have achieved."
He has gone back to the drawing board on what Chiltern Farms has always done: growing topfruit. South Africa's role in the future will be to supply top fruit to countries where it cannot be grown, countries roughly situated between the latitudes of 20 degrees North and 20 degrees South, a part of the globe that contains a lot of ocean and Africa, a market that, he suggests, South African exporters understand and work better than outsiders.
Because production starts ever earlier, and given the strong competition from the Northern Hemisphere, South Africa doesn't need to rush its apple exports, other than to Africa (except North Africa).
Justin Mudge with an aerial view of Chiltern Farms bordering the Theewaterskloof Dam
"No more excuses, only solutions"
Starting in 2027 the farm's production team will start with the first of their apple and pear blocks designed from the ground up with the metric of 85% class 1 on-tree packout, employing the best mid-21st century practices.
He has tired of club varieties - with the exception of Pink Lady, which he calls a once-in-a-generation phenomenon – and what interests him now are trials to find climate-resilient rootstocks and scions bred in his environs. A lowered reliance on inorganic fertilizers and a spirited effort to increase the soil carbon content, the practice of planting cover crops a year or two before orchard establishment – those are the down-to-earth notions that Mudge had set his team the aim of achieving to the hilt.
"You need to incrementally produce more premium fruit to be sustainable, and you need to be intentional about this. That is why we're embarking on new paradigm orchards. For too long we've used circumstances like the climate the soil or the rootstocks as justifications for low packouts. The new paradigm is a mindset that accepts no more excuses, only solutions."
Delegates from the International Tree Fruit Alliance visiting the farm in December were shown their experimental steps to date. "You cannot be innovative if you don't try new stuff. If you're just doing it as it's always been done, you're out of here. And guys have really tried new stuff over the last ten years."
Mudge recalls his grandfather saying, over fifty years ago as they were taking out a peach orchard on Chiltern Farms grown for the canning industry: "If I only have one customer, I'm a slave and I choose not to be a slave."
Freedom has returned to Chiltern Farms.
For more information:
Justin Mudge
Chiltern Farms
Tel: +27 28 841 4222
Email: info@chiltern.co.za
https://chiltern.co.za/