An Innovative Mobile Macadamia Dehusker

When Fairview Farm was using a static Macadamia Dehusker, KwaZulu-Natal macadamia farmer Robert Carlton-Shields estimated that his pickers each lost about two hours’ productivity a day during the harvest season. He set about remedying this, and his subsequent collaboration with an engineering company has resulted in a mobile macadamia dehusker that saves time and money. Lloyd Phillips reports.

- Lloyd Phillips

Robert Carlton-Shields bought Fairview Farm as a going concern in 2011, but it took about six years and approximately R700 000/ha in orchard re-establishment and management costs before he finally reaped a viable harvest from his 10ha of macadamia trees. Given this investment in money and time, he set about improving the cost-efficiency of his operation wherever he could.

According to Carlton-Shields, macadamia production is one of the fastest-expanding agriculture industries in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN).

This is confirmed by industry organisation Macadamias South Africa, which states that more than 2 000ha of macadamia orchards were established in the province in 2019 alone.

Carlton-Shields currently has 26 500 14-year- old trees, mostly of the Beaumont variety.

CONTAINING COSTS

Due to high input costs, he cannot afford any inefficiency in the harvesting process. In addition, the farm is situated in the Oribi Gorge area, where erratic local climatic conditions cause different parts of the orchards to flower and produce nuts at different times during the harvesting season, which runs from April to November. This means that each tree has to be visited three to four times in a season by pickers.

“Our 40 or so seasonal pickers use their pick sticks to knock ripe nuts from trees, which are about 6m tall,” he says. The pickers then collect the fallen nuts into 20kg bags in the 9m-wide rows between the trees. The average annual harvest is about 4,5t/ha of nut-in-shell.