Berry fruit management

We have available today in New Zealand the necessary husbandry knowledge and experience needed for the successful production of most horticultural crops. But the ability to put this knowledge into practice in a profitable way is a very young field of human endeavour. There is little doubt that the leaders in the berry fruit industry are well aware of the importance of management and are arming themselves with the knowledge necessary. Unfortunately there is a tremendous gap between the berry fruit leaders and the average as far as true managerial ability is concerned. Management is a very young science as far as horticulture is concerned, barely 10 years old in New Zealand. In the berry fruit industry it has not even jumped the first hurdle of establishing basic costs and returns for varying conditions of production and selling. It is imperative in a rapidly expanding industry competing more and more on export markets that we have detailed knowledge of costs and returns to provide a firm basis for negotiations both with exporters and processors. Attention to detail of this nature will in turn make growers more cost conscious and provide an incentive for budgeting and other simple forms of planning which are so essential to the efficient running of a business. In other countries detailed cost studies have been conducted on horticultural crops as a basis for managerial analysis and planning. The National Agricultural Advisory Service in Kent, England has published a 26-page booklet on "The profitability of Strawberries". It would be invaluable if we had something similar for each berry fruit in New Zealand. This is one of our management objectives at Lincoln College to provide basic income and expenditure data on a range of horticultural crops. Unfortunately one has to demonstrate the value of this data before growers will release reliable information from their own records. This is one of the reasons why we have had to produce crops of berry fruit ourselves. In addition of course the Department of Horticulture does not receive Government money for management research and must therefore supply money for this out of farm profits