A shiny new, blue dried fruit harvester is moving through the rows of vines at Robert Kennedy’s Irymple property in north-west Victoria.
Key points:
- In 2022, the dried fruit industry struggled to get all of its crop harvested due to a lack of machinery
- The first new dried fruit harvester manufactured locally in a decade was delivered to a Victorian property last week and is already being used
- At least nine new harvesters have been ordered by dried fruit producers
But securing this essential piece of equipment has not been easy and has meant a return to local manufacturing for the first time in more than a decade.
After significant challenges in 2022, Dried Fruits Australia’s innovation committee realised growers had no way of buying the specialised harvest equipment.
“There was a delay in harvesting, there was not enough equipment out there to pick these later varieties,” DFA’s innovation committee chairman Ashley Johnstone said.
And it hit the producers’ bottom line.
“Some growers had fruit that was left on the vine, or if it was picked, it was very, very wet and poor quality,” he said.
A long-standing dried fruit contract harvester left the industry, leaving some growers, including Mr Kennedy, weighing up their options.
So the innovation committee realised they would have to develop their own machine to ensure the dried fruit industry could get its crop off during the critical harvest window.
Build your own harvester
The DFA innovation committee’s first job was to find the best harvester being used in the Mildura area.
They then had plans for a new machine drawn up by a draughtsman.
And the final challenge was to find a company that was willing to manufacture the machine locally.
Mr Johnstone said Mildura’s Matt McWilliams and his company Interlink “stuck their hand up to produce these harvesters”.
“They’ve had a fairly steep learning curve during that process, [given] their main manufacturing line is sprayers, fungicide units or weedicide units.”
Nine machines ordered
While Mr Kennedy is already using the first new harvester, more are set to be built.
The next one will be bound for South Australia’s Riverland.
“I believe there’s a further seven that would be constructed afterwards, so that’s really positive for our industry,” Mr Johnstone said.
Mr Kennedy said there had been a fair bit of interest in the new harvester and he had been approached by a couple of growers to harvest their fruit.
But first he said he wanted to work his way through the 12 hectares of dried fruit growing on the properties that he and his parents own, which includes, Sunmuscat, Sunglo and currant varieties.
“We’re just trying to get my own fruit off first. So that’s the priority and that was one of the reasons we went ahead and bought the machine in the first place to make sure we could get our own fruit picked when we needed to,” he said.
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