Thousands of kilograms of blueberries have been stolen from a family-run blueberry orchard in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand. Image: veeterzy, via Pexels
Thousands of kilograms of blueberries have been stolen from a family-run blueberry orchard in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, causing financial woes for the business and its employees.
The fruit was stolen directly from the crop, said Marian Hirst, the owner of the Bay Blueberries farm in Hawke’s Bay.
She told reporters that when she and her team arrived to orchard to start the harvest, they found nothing but barren bushes.
“It was ghastly,” said Hirst.
“And what it means is, our team is standing there with their work gone. The foreman, the assistant foreman, all planning to work, packhouse people, gate sales and markets, all those people don’t have their work and their money.”
The loss of the crop has an unfortunate effect on the close-knit community, disrupting employment and income throughout the entire supply chain.
The theft was believed to have been conducted in one night, sometime within the first week of January.
While security measures were in place at the farm, including CCTV, they were unable to identify those responsible.
Hirst explained that the theft was another in a recent string of misfortunes.
“We’ve stood up and pulled things together after a cyclone, we lost 70 percent of our crop last year, we’re repairing infrastructure and making our plants healthy, and now someone’s come in and done this,” she said.
“We’re resilient, but there is a limit.”
Brydon Nesbit, the president of the Hawke’s Bay Grower’s Association, said that petty fruit crime wasn’t uncommon at this time of year, but that the scale of the operation was out of the ordinary.
“People go in there and take bags of apples, some bags of fruit, maybe sweetcorn which still isn’t good – it’s stealing from growers. But it’s not common to have that amount of produce stolen all at once,” said Nesbit.
“It seems like a pretty organised outfit who’s gone in there. They’ve got a purpose to steal all that fruit and I imagine they have taken that to market.”
He expressed sympathy for the owners of Bay Blueberries and others affected by the theft.
“For them to work so hard to spend so much money to get a crop and then to have it whipped out beneath them is absolutely devasting. My heart goes out to the company. It’s an appalling thing to have happen.”
