The first release of water from the Waimea Community Dam came in the nick of time for Vailima Orchards, which has grown a reputation as a supplier of quality apples domestically and overseas.
“The premium market in Asia demands a bigger apple, especially for the gifting market,” said Matthew Hoddy, fourth generation apple grower in the Tasman region and business manager at Vailima Orchards.
“If you’re visiting a family member, for instance, you’d take a couple of nice apples from New Zealand that would be cut up to share, rather than here where you might take a box of chocolates or a bottle of wine.”
Vailima grows 10 varieties of apples on 218 hectares on the Waimea Plains, including the Eve, Ambrosia and Evercrisp varieties its marketing arm Luv’ya Apples holds intellectual property licences for. As well as supplying the New Zealand and Asia markets, it also exports to North America and Western Europe.
But the extreme drought faced by the region earlier this year threatened to severely impact the size of the crop, limiting where the fruit could be sold.
“In early March, if the dam hadn’t started flowing we’d have been heading for significant rationing steps,” Hoddy said. “Leading into the season it was a dry summer and although the aquifers were well managed between council and irrigators, we’d had so long without rain it’d got to that critical point. Severe rationing would have without doubt affected crop size.
“That would have put pressure on our marketers to find a home for smaller fruit in a different market that might have been full already.”
It’s not just this year’s crop the extended drought conditions would have impacted, Hoddy said, but the following year’s too, as at that time the trees were setting buds for 2025’s fruit. Any further water restrictions would also have posed a fatal risk to productive trees, some of which date back 35 years.
“Thankfully because of the release of water from the Waimea Dam we managed to continue to irrigate and size the fruit needed to meet the market demands.”
At its peak the orchard employs around 245 workers, and 150 at the post-harvest side of the business.
In a good year over 14 million kilogrammes of fruit is grown on Vailima’s orchard properties, something Hoddy’s great grandfather Walter could only have dreamed of when he first began the family business over 100 years ago.
A draper from England, he’d ventured to New Zealand in 1914 after seeing the Appleby Apple Lands advertised in a London newspaper. Initially planting in the Moutere Hills, the family relocated to the Waimea Plains in 1972 at a time the Waimea East Irrigation Scheme was being established.
“The system turned these plains into 1000ha with fully pressurised irrigation water,” said Hoddy, who was brought up on the orchard and has a Bachelor of Commerce (Horticulture) from Lincoln University.
“It used to be sufficient because the minimum river levels were a lot lower, so irrigators could water their crops longer into the season before rationing started. Following a round of environmental changes the minimum river flow was increased, so any rationing kicked in earlier with the river health in mind.
“Getting your crops ready for harvest and then suddenly having no water, it was never going to work.”
Eighteen potential locations were assessed for a dam before the Lee Valley was chosen. The five-year construction project cost $198.2 million and was funded by its shareholders, Tasman District Council (TDC) and Waimea Irrigators Ltd.
The project faced complications including delays caused by covid, global supply chain disruptions, costs of materials, and unexpected geological hurdles.
“We commenced filling the reservoir in September last year after completing the intake pipework,” said Mike Scott, CEO of Waimea Water Ltd, the organisation tasked with the dam’s construction.
“Murphy’s Law, we had three really wet winters and springs while we constructed the dam but as soon as we started filling the reservoir it was very dry, so the reservoir filled much slower than expected – that’s when the drought started.”
At full capacity, behind its 53m high concrete face, the reservoir is able to hold 13 billion litres of water, a volume reached on January 31 this year.
“We needed the reservoir at full capacity for water to flow down the spillway before we could remove the temporary river diversion and connect the pipework, otherwise the river would have dried up,” Scott said.
“As soon as that happened, we were working flat out through the month of February to get the pipework connections finished and the valve ready.”
Water was finally released on March 2, resulting in restrictions being lifted for all, including domestic users.
Said Scott: “That was two days before TDC had been due to increase their restrictions, which would have been quite painful to the primary sector, industry and other users.
“Between the date of opening the valve and the region’s first rainfall of any significance on 11th April, we released 20% of the reservoir, so we got there just in time and the Waimea Dam did its job. It was a great relief but also a very exhausting period for the team who put in a big shift and worked long hours to get it finished.”
Hoddy said: “As an orchard we’ve invested heavily to get the dam project over the line and working, along with a lot of the other growers on the Waimea Plains.
“Knowing we could have some surety around some of the input parameters, with the dam being built, gave us the certainty to develop more intensely with some of the structures to improve yield. It gave us that confidence to keep reinvesting and to know we can keep doing this on the Waimea Plains.”
He recalls another harsh summer. “For us water-wise this was the year of the Pigeon Valley fires, summer of 2019. We did go into some very severe rationing and that made it a harder year to size fruit. The result was we couldn’t export the ideal sizes to the ideal markets for the premium customers.”
This presented potential problems with brand presence, a concern that was growing dramatically at the start of this year too as the drought’s severity increased.
“When you’re dealing with a buyer and you can’t fulfil, it’s especially hard to come back another year in better conditions,” said Hoddy.
The stability of water supply has enabled more investment in a formal trellis system, which, although coming with higher capital costs, Vailima is implementing to produce greater yields.
“These new developments actually lead to more permanent jobs and more meaningful jobs because putting up the structures needs skilled people,” Hoddy said. “So it’s not just about picking and packing apples, it’s everything else that goes with that.”
