Embracing Hort in Canterbury

For more than 50 years, South Canterbury’s Turley Farms has been finding new ways to use the agricultural land in the region, adding horticultural crops and hybrid vegetable seed production to traditional arable and livestock options, and now the family company is investing in large-scale apple production as well.

The Turley operation started when Murray Turley’s father Alan bought a small farm near Temuka in 1952 which he gradually expanded and by the time his son came home, the property had grown to 400ha, mainly used for arable production. 

Under Murray’s watch, that grew to 4000ha, producing an expanding range of crops and including a dairy operation, but has since been scaled back to 1900ha with the sale of the dairy farm when Turley’s took a 20 percent stake in corporate farming operator Dairy Holdings instead.

The Turleys have always looked for new, more profitable ways to use the land, and were one of the pioneers of growing potatoes and onions at scale in Mid and South Canterbury.

“Potatoes were a low margin crop, but in the early 1970s we were the first in South Canterbury to mechanically harvest them rather than hand-picking them and that took a lot of costs out of the growing operation for a process crop,” says Murray.

In 1993 the potato business was expanded with the purchase of three farms near Chertsey, about an hour north of Temuka, just south of the Rakaia River.

“We converted them to the first of the new generation centre pivots to come into New Zealand, and started growing potatoes there. It was a change of land use for that area and that led to growing sweetcorn for processing as well.”

In the late 1990s he spotted an opportunity to grow onions too, originally targeting Russia as a market. “The Russia thing disappeared, but we carried on growing onions and learnt we could grow them on scale here and probably at a lower production cost than some other areas in New Zealand.”

Next on the list was hybrid vegetable seed production, and today Turley’s has nearly 200ha devoted to growing carrot, spinach, radish, beet and canola seed for Northern Hemisphere clients.  A larger area of land is used for wheat, grass and white clover seed crops, and there are cattle and lambs grazing other parts of the farm as well.

The availability of water from the Rangitata South irrigation scheme has been key to Turley Farms growing arable crop in an area that doesn’t have the plentiful groundwater farmers further north in Mid Canterbury can tap into.

“We have low yielding bores, but knowing the Rangitata South scheme was going to go ahead gave us confidence to build a 400,000 cubic metre storage pond to store the scheme water. Rangitata South’s given us reliable water to finish the crops.”

Making the best use of that water is important. “We’re always scanning the horizon for what’s out there, what new crops we can take on,” says Murray, who describes himself as an “ideas person”.

“None of this would be possible without our permanent employees and their dedication,” he says.

“I guess I pop the idea and then walk away and see what happens. I put some challenges out there for the staff and they respond.”

It has always been a family business, with Murray’s wife Margaret looking after human resources, payroll and other office jobs, but as the operation has become larger and more complex more staff have been brought in, including their daughter Belinda Skinner, an accountant, who is now chief financial officer.

When Murray suggested they look at growing apples, Turley Farms’ board, which includes two independent directors and their accountant and lawyer, needed to see a business case.

“It’s a big job working through the feasibility of the orchard. That’s Belinda’s strength,” Murray says.

“Apples had been on my mind for quite a long time. We’re lucky with our land, we can do so many things with it. This particular land is too stoney to grow potatoes or onions so you think, ‘what is another land use change?’.”

Dominic Cosgrove who until then was in charge of their onion and potato production, found himself in a new role, studying the feasibility of growing apples on a large scale in South Canterbury. “He didn’t see that coming!” Murray laughs.

“What I knew about apples you could have written on the back of a postage stamp,” Dominic says, but after visiting top growers in Nelson and Hawke’s Bay his knowledge quickly grew.

“In 2021 we planted a small trial orchard with about ten different varieties, covering a spectrum of early and mid-season, and planted some more in 2022. We tried to cover a lot of bases and tried everything we could get our hands on really.”

The variety that stood out was Rockit™.  “In terms of tree health, it started to work its way to the top of the pile and the commercial, marketing side of it is a good story so it made sense to look into that further. Every step along the way it started to make a little bit more sense to go in that direction,” says Dominic.

“So 2023, three weeks before the cyclone, we had the chairman and chief executive of Rockit down here to look at the trial orchard and they were thinking of diversifying into Canterbury, and by late May the decision had gone from planting 10ha of Rockit to 20ha,” adds Murray.

As a student Dominic picked apples for Applefields, a Christchurch based venture that later exited the industry in favour of property development, but much has changed in the decades since then.

“They had massive trees and you had to reposition the ladder four times to get round the tree,” he recalls.

But on Turley’s Yap Orchard (Yap being the Scottish name for apple), the trees are being grown under a 2D (two-dimensional) system, trellised on wires to allow for greater light penetration and easier picking.

“They will still be handpicked, but we make use of work platforms on which we can put four or six people. We can separate out the top four or five wires, so the top section is picked from the platform and the bottom is picked from the ground.”

Dominic says he was surprised how willingly top orchardists shared their knowledge.

“The pipfruit industry is quite open and transparent with a lot of things so we’ve had a lot of help from various players. Even people that traditionally would be seen as competition have been really willing to share a lot of detail, so it’s been quite encouraging for us.  

But while he eagerly absorbed that knowledge, it was also necessary to adapt it to local conditions.

“In Hawke’s Bay and Nelson they will plant the trees first and then they put the posts in, but we realised on this stoney soil that if we didn’t have irrigation on pretty quickly the trees would suffer, whereas they have a higher rainfall and their soils have more margin for error. 

"So we put the posts and wires up first and that means we can have the drip tape up soon after planting and give them a drink within a month or six weeks. We’ve imported a couple of machines from Italy to dig a trench around the posts so we can have that infrastructure and trellis in ahead of time.

“It’s all about adaptability; here we have our own challenges that we have to adapt to.”

One major advantage they have in South Canterbury is having a green fields site. “It’s more or less a square paddock, whereas in Hawke’s Bay and Nelson land’s very scarce so they’ll end up with a block that might be two sides residential or might have a creek and different shapes in it, so they’ll end up with none of their rows the same. But here we can have pretty much all our rows the same length, the same number of trees, which makes management a whole lot easier.”

For the first couple of years as production ramps up, the apples will likely be sent to Central Otago or Hawke’s Bay for packing, but then it’s likely a packhouse will be built in Rolleston, just south of Christchurch.

For now, apples are Murray Turley’s focus, but chances are he’ll soon turn his mind to other land use changes and other crops. “This probably opens up other opportunities,” he says.

“If we want to diversify into something else here, we have the land to do it,” Margaret adds.

 

This article was first published in the October issue of NZGrower & Orchardist.