WAs largest mango orchard on track for best season in years

Despite severe labour shortages plaguing Australia's agriculture sector, WA's largest mango packing shed has sprung back to life in the Ord Irrigation Scheme and will pack up to 200,000 trays of fruit this season after a long hiatus. 

Key points:

WA's largest mango orchard is on track to produce up to 200,000 trays this season

Meanwhile, smaller growers in the Ord are experiencing mixed success

It's hoped new mango varieties will boost overall production across the region

The orchard, formerly known as Galango, came under new management last year after Swag Rural Pty Ltd signed a lease with an option to buy the Galati Group property.

Farm manager Steve Angel said it had been a nervous lead-up to picking this month, with lockdowns and border closures around the country making it challenging to secure labour.

However, with more than 70 staff now recruited across the orchard and packing shed, he said the season was shaping up to be a success.

"There were a lot of sleepless nights [but] we've been fortunate with great growing conditions and to overcome early labour shortages to be in production," Mr Angel said.

"We have about 65 to 70 per cent of the orchard now that is producing and hopefully next year we'll move into 85 or 90 per cent of the orchard.

"I really believe that it can grow into something that could produce 400,000 to 500,000 trays of fruit every year … and on a really good year maybe we'd hit the million."

A majority of Kununurra's mango production will come from the old Galango orchard.(ABC Kimberley: Courtney Fowler)A long road to success

With 120,000 trees on the outskirts of Kununurra and a packing shed the size of 10 basketball courts, the orchard has the potential to produce one million trays at full capacity.

The property was famously snapped up by the 'Spud King' Tony Galati in 2012, after the Rewards Group-managed investment scheme went into receivership, and it was most recently leased to a group of Darwin growers who walked away from a joint venture in 2019.

Mr Angel said over the past 18 months he had put considerable time into reviving the deteriorating orchard and with the backing of some additional investors, the hard work was starting to pay off.

Steve Angel formed Swag Rural with a group of investors in 2020.(ABC Kimberley: Courtney Fowler)

However, the journey to revive the property has not been an easy ride, with the orchard smashed by a storm last year that caused millions of dollars worth of damage.

The entire industry was hit hard in the Ord last year â€" with poor climatic conditions seeing the region record one of its worst mango seasons on record.

Mr Angel said while Kensington Pride (KP) yields had been disappointing again this season, his R2E2 trees were producing high volumes of good quality fruit, destined for export to domestic and international markets.

Export trial to Hong Kong

While most of the produce was trucked to Perth, Mr Angel was the first grower in the Ord to export mangoes overseas for almost a decade, with a small quantity being flown to Hong Kong via the newly built Darwin Export Hub.

"We take a certain amount of fruit out ... and put it into the export market, so it doesn't flood the domestic market," Mr Angel said.

"And the little bit that doesn't make export goes to the Eastern seaboard.

"The domestic market is so strong that we can even sell a lot of our third-grade fruit … the prices are quite good at the moment."

R2E2s going through WA's largest mango pack house, which has the capacity to produce up to a million trays of fruit each year.(ABC Kimberley: Courtney Fowler)

First-grade Calypsos fetched the highest prices in the Australian market last week with wholesalers paying as much as $68 a tray for the variety, which has begun to dominate supermarket shelves in recent years.

But volumes of consumer favourite KP are noticeably in decline across the country particularly in Kununurra, which has the highest average temperature of any mango-growing region in the north.

Mixed success for smaller growers

The decline of the KP variety has hit smaller players hard in the Ord Valley, like Quentin Parker who packs for several growers at Parker Poynt Packhouse.

"I think those good old days are gone, where I used to do 100,000 trays through the shed," he said.

"I'm thinking I'll probably do about 10,000 to 11,000 this year, that's about it … there's just not the fruit out there.

"I really do not know why the KP is just failing us. Maybe we've had too many fires, maybe we are just one degree warmer than we normally are … and one degree just might be the difference."

Mango grower Quentin Parker packs mangoes at Parker Poynt Packhouse in Kununurra.(ABC Rural: Tom Edwards)

There are hopes that three new varieties being trialled on commercial farms as part of the National Mango Breeding Program could offer a boost to production in Kununurra.

Work started on the project around 25 years ago, which made headlines in 2010 when it was suggested one of the varieties should be named after Kylie Minogue. 

However, for now, they are still referred to by their plant breeding codes NMBP 1201, 1243 and 4069.

New varieties offer hope

Mr Parker planted 250 trees of a new variety with the sweet, juicy taste of the KP in 2018 in the hope it would extend the growing season and help boost production.

He was excited by the prospect of picking small quantities for the first time this season.

"If we can lead by example and prove that some of these new varieties might be the go, [and] if we can start thinking about exporting and that kind of thing, we will attract some big players to the area," Mr Parker said.

New mango varieties are being touted as the way of the future for the Australian mango industry.(Supplied: Department of Agriculture and Food WA)

Further south, in Carnarvon, the harvest is less than two months away with Gascoyne fruit due to hit supermarket shelves early in the New Year following a 70,000 tray season in 2020â€"21.

Meanwhile, over the border, the Northern Territory's mango season peaked in Darwin earlier this month with 272,000 trays picked and packed last week according to data from the Australian Mango Industry Association.

And with orchards in Katherine now ramping up production, the NT is forecast to produce around 4.4 million trays of mangoes before the end of the year  more than a million trays down on the 2019â€"20 season's record-breaking crop. 

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