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Source: Supplied.
How would you feel if you woke up one day to find your business was bust?
That’s what happened to over 3,000 kiwifruit orchardists in the Te Puke region of New Zealand in 2010, when they were hit with a vine-eating disease called PSA.
To stop it from spreading further, the orchardists were left with no choice but to cut out their infected vines. This meant literally rebuilding their businesses from the ground up, and in some cases going five years without an income as the new vines matured to fruit-bearing age.
Making matters much worse, the farms they had worked years to build were now next to worthless.
Fellow Chartered Accountant Trudi Ballantyne. Source: Supplied.
It was an agribusiness disaster of epic proportions, and the humble kiwifruit was at the heart of it.
In 2010, a kiwifruit vine-eating disease called Psa quietly crept through the orchards of New Zealand’s Te Puke region.
Just like that, a billion-dollar industry was at a standstill and more than 3,000 growers were in crisis until a fellow Chartered Accountant by the name of Trudi Ballantyne stepped in with an innovative solution.
No choice but to start over
On the frontlines of the kiwi catastrophe, the growers learned that the only way to control the spread of Psa was to cut out their vines. Having to cut out the vines would mean ‘greenfielding’ a five year process whereby mature vines are removed and replaced with new plantings. This loss of their livelihoods was a devastating prospect.