The Art of Picking Kiwifruit

I say kiwifruit-picking because in New Zealand, the people are Kiwis, the fruit is kiwifruit.

When I left the Bay of Islands, I had depleted more of my savings than I cared to admit, and I had stared unemployment in the face in Kerikeri. I needed to go somewhere where I was guaranteed a job, and now I was willing to do anything.

Abe found a backpacker hostel in the Bay of Plenty (southeast of the Bay of Islands and of Auckland) that advertised as a place where you could stay while you looked for work kiwifruit-picking. The owner, Owen, told us there was plenty of work to be had, so off we went to his farm house turned backpacker a few minutes south of a small town called Paengaroa.

Before I came to New Zealand I pictured fruit-picking as a fun job working outside. I imagined myself helping out on a family farm, walking through small rows of vines, casually picking fruit and placing it in a woven basket while I talked and laughed with other backpackers in the sunshine.

That vision was obviously not reality.

On our second day at Owen’s farm, a contractor showed up to see if any new backpackers had arrived looking for work. We said we would like to work, and he replied that we should follow him. “Oh, you mean right now?” Yes, he had come to collect anyone who wanted to work today.

We grabbed a few things to eat for lunch and hurried to follow him to his car. Pravin, our new contractor, was a 21-year old guy originally from Nepal. He has worked in the orchards for three years. We tried to ask him a few questions about what we would be doing in the car, but he waved his hand or answered with an annoyed, “Yes, yes.” After driving for about 30 minutes, our driver, an older South Korean guy whose name I can’t remember since I’ve never seen him after that first day, admitted he could not remember where the orchard was. “Oh, do you work at a lot of different orchards?” I asked. Yes, they worked at new orchards almost every day.

After driving around for another 30 minutes looking for cell phone service, we ran into a car they recognized and followed them to the orchard. At the orchard, we followed a sea of people to a shed where several official-looking people wearing bright orange construction vests were standing. As we passed them, they handed us giant black picking bags, hair nets, and gloves. I studied the bag to see how I was supposed to wear it, and another official barked at me to put my feet in a bucket. “What?” “You need to clean your shoes before you go into the orchard,” he said quickly. I dunked my shoes one at a time in the soapy water and followed the crowd.

Now I saw just how incorrect my vision had been. The kiwifruit vines were in thick, long rows, and there were dozens of them. I was not sure how many pickers were at the orchard, but it seemed like at least 50. Abe and I, and our new housemate Alex, a young chef from Germany, were assigned to a group of 12 to start on one row. In our group, it was everyone’s first day picking kiwifruit. We stepped under the thick shroud of vines to begin picking, looking at each other to see how to wear the picking bag. 

Noticing our confusion, a contractor, named Bhakdat, came over and showed us how to wear the bag and how to pick the kiwifruit “five or six fruit at a time in each hand” he said loudly in broken English, and then how to dump our full bags into the large wooden bins scattered around the orchard. I looked around for Pravin, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Ok, pick now! And pick fast,” Bhakdat said. “The more you pick, the more money for you. You pick the fruit gently, but quickly.” We started picking because we did not know what else to do. As we picked, I said to Abe and Alex, “How will we be paid?” They shrugged.

After a few hours of picking, someone called out, “Lunchtime!” and we followed the sea of people back to the carpark. Pravin and our South Korean driver showed up and unlocked the car, so we could get our food. We sat on the grass by the car and ate, speculating about how many kiwifruit we had picked and how we would get paid.

At the end of the day, Bhakdat took our group aside and told us that the 12 of us had picked 39 bins of kiwifruit. That sounded pretty good to me, since each bin is about the size of a double bed. He said he would pay us $15.50 per bin, which was higher than the going rate of $15 per bin. “How much is that per person?” one German girl asked. Since that rate had to be divided by 12 people, it turned out we had made about $38 after taxes for six hours of work. Six hours of hard work reaching up or bending below vines to pick handfuls of kiwifruit while carrying around a picking bag on your stomach that made me feel pregnant with a 40 pound baby.

This did not seem worth it.

Pravin dropped us at Owen’s farm house and took down my mobile number. “I will text you tomorrow morning if there is work,” he said. “What time?” I asked. “Be ready at 7:30 a.m.”

And each morning for two weeks we woke up at 6:30 to check the weather. If it rained, we could not work, if the sun was out, we got ready by 7:30 a.m. in case Pravin showed up. One sunny day, he did not come pick us up or text to say why. The next day when he showed up around 10 a.m.— we never knew what time he would come to take us to work because it depended on when the orchard told him the fruit was dry enough to pick—he told us he had a flat tire the day before. “Was your phone dead too, so you couldn’t call us or answer my texts?” I thought to myself.

We worked four days that first week and only two days the second week. Half of the days we did not work it rained, and the other half it was cloudy or Pravin just never showed. “Everyone told us you could make great money fruit-picking,” I said to my housemates one day. In Owen’s house, we lived with about 20 people, from Argentina, Chile, France, Germany, England, Scotland and Canada. It all depends on the weather, they said. And it has rained a lot this season.

Every time we got into a new car Pravin came to pick us up in, I felt like an illegal immigrant being carted off to work at a new orchard. Directions on how to handle the fruit and what to do before entering the orchard were barked at us from an orchard manager, and we picked as fast as we could. We guzzled water every two hours when we got a break and ate our sandwiches savagely at lunchtime. Physical work made me hungrier than I’d ever been.

In some orchard groups, we talked with the other workers. In others, they spoke to each other in Hindi, Mandarin, German, or Spanish. In all of the orchards after that first day, we were paid an hourly rate, which was better for us since we were slower than the fruit pickers who had been working at this for 11 years. 

Since we picked only in Golden kiwifruit orchards, we had to be gentler with the fruit than people who picked Green. An orchard manager told us that the Golden kiwifruit, became scuffed or punctured more easily than other fruit. We needed to pick fast but carefully. And we should not pick the under-sized or oddly shaped kiwifruit. None of these were saleable, they told us.

That was all there was to learn about picking kiwifruit, so we settled into the long hours of picking row after row of kiwifruit. We started bringing our iPods to better pass the time.

After two weeks of confusion, hard work, low pay, and boredom, Abe, Alex, and I decided we had had enough of our “kiwi experience,” or as Alex called it “our kiwi nightmare” because we all said we saw kiwifruit when we closed our eyes to go to sleep at night.

“Well, at least we know what fruit-picking is like now!” I said.

A girl we lived with from Argentina, Guille, told us she could get us jobs at the kiwifruit packhouse, where we could work six days a week and work regular hours. “I think we are up for anything,” I said. Because after learning the non-art of kiwifruit-picking, I really am game for anything.

Lunchtime and breaks were often spent greedily eating off-brand Nutella straight out of the jar.

What kiwifruit orchards really look like

Me in picking get up.

This is Abe stretching out his back since he spent most of his time crouching underneath the kiwifruit vines.

Owen's farm house/ backpacker hostel

We have horses and cows at our farm house! And sometimes we have to walk through the cows to get to the house which really freaks me out because the cows outnumber us.