Most people look forward to relaxing after a day’s work among the kiwifruit vines. But three nights a week, Palvinder Singh got behind the wheel of a taxi for another shift.
By day, he learnt the kiwifruit industry from the ground up – pruning, driving harvest machinery and eventually supervising orchard gangs. The hours were long, but he always knew what he was working towards.
“I had a dream of owning my own orchard one day,” he says. “I worked two jobs for seven years to save enough money. I’m proud of that.”
His love of growing can be traced back to his father’s farm in Punjab, India, where his family grew a wide variety of crops, including potatoes, rice, sugar cane and watermelons.
Palvinder began helping after school when he was about 13 and gradually took on more responsibility as he grew older.
“My brothers and I learnt a lot just by watching what they were doing,” he says. “Then we learnt to drive tractors and other machinery.”
Palvinder and his wife moved to New Zealand in 2004 and both found work in kiwifruit, joining an industry in which some of his relatives were already involved. Palvinder took part-time English classes to help him find his feet in his new country, and the couple have since raised two sons, Jaskaran, now 21, and Jasraj, 14.
His experience growing crops gave Palvinder a solid foundation, but kiwifruit presented a new challenge. By 2017, he had saved enough to buy his first orchard in Te Puke. It already had three hectares of Hayward vines, and Palvinder has since developed the remaining bare land and planted another two hectares of SunGold. He and a friend also bought a 5ha orchard in the lower Kaimais together the following year.
Over the years, Palvinder has drawn on many friends and industry contacts as he learnt the ropes. Looking for better packhouse results, he moved his fruit to Mpac in 2020, adding its grower services team to the people he could turn to for support.
“If any small issues come up, Tim fixes them,” he says of Mpac Grower Services Manager Tim Crossman. His Grower Services Representative, Gurjinder Singh, is also close at hand. “Anything I need, I can call them. We have a lot of experience now, but if we need advice, they help us. They treat us very well.
“I like their service and we know everyone by name. If there’s a problem, we know who we can ask.”
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. In the years after COVID, redevelopment work on both orchards made for a difficult period. A frost also reduced the crop at the lower Kaimai orchard one season.
“It was a hard time,” he says. “Now it’s going smoothly, and both orchards are doing well.”
His eldest son, Jaskaran, has just finished a finance and accounting degree and helps with business paperwork and occasional orchard jobs. “In the future, both my sons will be helping me grow more,” Palvinder says.
For now, he takes satisfaction in what he has built. “I’m proud because we have developed a lot of bare land ourselves. We’ve learnt so many skills in kiwifruit along the way and we hope in future we might be able to buy a little more land to grow our own crops. “We will keep packing with Mpac in future too. I’m so happy with them.”