Award-winning mango producer says 100t/ha is possible

Jaco Fivaz, farm manager of Mohlatsi farm in Limpopo, is a pioneer of high-density mango orchards, which achieve a greater yield per hectare than conventional orchards. Pieter Dempsey visited this award-winning grower to find out more about his passion for experimentation, and how he manages a diverse mango business.

- Pieter Dempsey

Jaco Fivaz has a wealth of experience in mango production and has been the farm manager on Mohlatsi farm near Hoedspruit in Limpopo for the past 17 years.

The farm produces a wide variety of mango cultivars, such as Tommy Atkins, Keitt and Sensation, and also has a packhouse, a drying unit, and an achar production facility. The packhouse is used only for about four months of the year, during the harvest season, while the drying unit, which can dry a variety of products, runs throughout the year. The achar unit was started in 2016 and produces between 150t and 600t a year depending on the availability of fruit.

A more recent venture, which opened a year ago, is the farm store, where mango-inspired products are directly sold to the public. It is run by Fivaz’s wife, Belinda, and Fivaz is particularly proud of its success. Everything in the store is made from, or includes mangoes.

“People were always contacting us wanting to buy directly from the factory or production facility, so we decided to create a separate space to sell a wide variety of products such as achars, mango mustard and chutneys, as well as mango candyfloss.”

Fivaz started his career as a crop researcher on mangoes in 1994 at the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in Mbombela. He completed his master’s degree at the University of Pretoria on the pollination and fruit set of litchis, but was employed as a post-harvest researcher at the ARC.

“However, I soon became more involved with pruning instead of post-harvest research,” he says.

After this, he worked as a researcher at Westfalia Technological Services and in 1998 started at Bavaria Fruit Estate, where he first started farming mangoes.