Prebbleton business has grown fast like its mushrooms

Press, 7 May 1983, Page 23

Prebbleton business has grown fast like its mushrooms

By

NEILL BIRSS

An English farmer and a Christchurch lawyer began mushroom farming at Prebbleton in 1970 with a capital of $17,000 each. Their sales this financial year will top $lO million. Mr Roger Giles, of Sussex, befriended Mr Philip Burdon, now member of Parliament for Fendalton, when the young Nev/ Zealander was practising law in Britain in the late 19605. They decided to go mushroom farming. Cyprus was picked as the site, because of its climate and because Mr Giles had family associations with the island. Soon after setting up in Cyprus they also began mushroom farming in Canterbury. Prebbleton at the time seemed an ideal site, says Mr Giles. The farm needed to be near an airport, for distribution, and it needed to be near a source of wheat straw, which was available in Canterbury. “There were few houses over the road in those days. The village had a garage which we thought would be helpful in getting things repaired; we couldn’t afford the gear for maintenance ourselves. And there was a bus stop.” Since then the firm has been through years of townplanning battles as residents fought its expansion, and Mr Giles agrees that if they were setting up all over again, they would not choose the present site. But one thing no-one disputes is that the firm, Meadow Mushrooms, Ltd, has been an outstanding commercial success. Extensions now being completed on a 24.5 hectare site at the corner of Springs Road and Halswell Junction Road (next to the SPCA in Wilmers Road), will swell the number of employees from 250 to 330. The firm is already paying more than S2M a year in wages, and is spending about SIM on the extensions. When Mr Giles and Mr Burdon launched into mushroom farming in 1969 they knew virtually nothing about the industry. Their expertise consisted of a publunch interview with an Oxford expert on the crop and a visit to a handful of British mushroom farms. Then it was into a- LandRover and off towards Cyprus. This Mediterranean venture ended when the Turks invaded the island. The processing part of the venture overlooked Nicosia Airport and was bombed out. The New Zealand farm became the sole part of the venture, and the pair knuckled down to work. “Mushroom farming is incredible attention to detail,” says Mr Giles. Painstaking attention must be given to hygiene so that the mushroom fungi have no com-

petition m tneir growth. The cycle begins on farms which sell Meadow Mushrooms 12,000 big bales of wheat straw a year. After a fire at the factory, most of the straw is now stockpiled on farms nearby. Each week about 200 bales of straw are broken open and composted with chicken manure, horse manure, and brewer’s grain (insufficient horse manure is available for it alone to fill composting needs). After two weeks of composting, the material goes into a big chamber where it is sterilised with steam. After a week, with automatic monitoring of the heat and carbon-dioxide levels, the material is put in the mushroom beds. There it is seeded with mycelium (spawn) from the firm’s subsidiary, Miranda Laboratories, Ltd, at Sockburn. The life cycle of the mushroom from the seeding of the beds with the spawn is 10 weeks, and it is cropped for the last seven of these. Meadow Mushrooms has about 9300 sq m (100,000 sq ft) of floor space in the sheds at Prebbleton in which the mushrooms are raised, and the beds are in tiers in the darkened, temperature and humidity-con-trolled buildings. Every morning of the year except Christmas Day pickers go into the sheds at 6 a m. and work until about 2.30 p.m. Each will bring in 15 to 20kg of mushrooms per hour to the weighing centre. The scales are linked to a microcomputer, and the picker’s code number is keyboarded in. The information allows the automatic calculation of bonuses for addition to the flat rate of pay. The mushrooms are packed and stored in a cooler, which the firm tries to clear each day, flying fresh mushrooms to towns from Invercargill to Whangarei, and to Australia, Singapore, and Japan. Other mushrooms go to the firm’s canning division, Emma Foods, to be packaged in foil for sale frozen, or to be dehydrated, or to go out in cans. By far the country’s largest grower, Meadow Mushrooms ■ produces perhaps about 50 per cent of the national output. The firm, with its extension, expects to produce about 45,000 kg of mushrooms a week. Of its fresh-product sales, about 40 per cent goes overseas, mainly to Australia.

Mr Giles and Mr Burden have checked the growth of the firm by scaling down the new farm from its planned two-thirds capacity of the Prebbleton farm. This is largely because of a decision not to push too hard in the Australian market for fear of causing a protectionist reaction such as that recently taken against New Zealand timber products. The new sheds will now have 40 per cent of the floor area of the Prebbleton sheds. The limit has not been reached in overseas and domestic sales, says Mr Giles. New Zealanders still eat fewer mushrooms per head than the British, for example, though New Zealand consumption has been steadily rising in recent years. Meadow Mushrooms has played an important part in this by making mushrooms available the year round. There were commercial growers in the country before, of course, but they were small, often depending heavily on door sales. In times of a bumper fieldmushroom crop (as this year), these firms were at risk. Mr John Dunford, the

manager of Miranda Laboratories, was in business in Auckland as a grower 12 years ago, and recalls that in 1970, a good year for field mushrooms, about eight growers he knows of went out of business. There are difficulties with 1 exports. Queensland and. West Australia are proving good markets for Meadow Mushrooms, but in Asia, various regions have tastes for various types of mushrooms.

ing about $600,000 a year with the airline. the firm continues its quest for an ever-better mus hroom. . The name of the game is S i a^S e ? - The ideal according to overseas market research is slightly bigger than a 50c piece, and white. The productivity of the strain has been gradually raised, and is now producing 22kg per square metre

Gibbons, a food technologist. Its cans are an important market outlet for the farm, and the crumbed frozen mushrooms have proved popular in the Middle East and Australia. But the firm also has an important role in helping to smooth out the troughs in demand; the mushrooms are harvested daily, and if there is a market lull, more of them, can be channelled into cans. The market for canned mushrooms in New Zealand is growing in line with the demand for fresh mushrooms. Supervising the range of activities of Meadow Mushrooms is a commendably light administrative structure. Mr Giles and Mr Alan Gordon supervise mushroom production. A finance director, Mr Alan Freeman, who has been looking after the firm’s accounts since he worked for the public accountant to whom the firm founders went in 1970, supervises the finances and helps the marketing manager, Mr Colin Booth. Mr Burdon, preoccupied with the affairs of the land as an M.P., at present can spare only an hour or two a week to the firm’s activities. The farm looks like a factory, but running it is more like farming than manufacturing. “You can’t draw up plans like you can for making, say, nuts and bolts,” says Mr Giles, as he explains the problems of dealing with an organic product, and the labour-intensive nature of the farm. Its rapid growth brought

the firm into difficulty with the local body town and country planning scheme when an amendment changed the site from an area of conforming use to being in an area of existing use. The upshot was that it was unable to expand its factory area, though production kept rising by the use of more trays per shed and denser compost. Soon, however, it became apparent that the yields per tray were no longer proportionate to the amount of 1 compost used. So the company decided in August of last year to buy the land at the corner of Springs Road and Halswell Junction Road — one of the few blocks zoned suitable for mushroom growing between the Prebbleton farm and Christchurch Airport. The scaling down of the expansion has come against a background of the recession’s reducing the Australian market, and closer Economic Relations, which could mean severe competition on the New Zealand market. The duplication of machinery (mainly that for preparing bed material), which would have cost $500,000, has been abandoned. Now, on the eve of the extension’s coming into production, Mr Giles has had second thoughts, which might lead to its closing. He believes that recent technical developments in Britain may make it possible to produce the composting material for the mushroom beds without any smell. And it is the noise

and smell, he believes, which have prevented the firm from getting permission to increase the scale of operations at Prebbleton. Mr Giles says he has progressively reduced the amount of methyl bromide gas used for post-crop sterilising; this had been an early source of objection. Fans have been muffled and the firm is looking at new mufflers to quieten the fork-lift trucks, and the smell is perhaps the last problem to overcome, he feels. “If I had known about the possibility of solving the smell problem before the last appeal case we might

have been expanding on the present site instead of 3km away. “In the light of this development the company is now preparing to re-submit to the Paparua County Council the original application to enable buildings to be erected so that all growing will be at the Prebbleton farm. This will be a far more efficient unit than the two separate units that are now about to be utilised.” If this re-submission were successful the new site would be sold, in spite of the $500,000 spend on land and buildings. (The other $500,000 spent on the extensions was the cost of plant). So the mushroom farm is likely to stay in the news

from the tribunals and hearings, and in the letters-to-the-editor columns. In the hubbub, the commercial success story is likely to be lost sight of. The two men who put in $17,000 each and a lot of sweat on a 10-acre site (now 20 acres) last year re-in-vested almost $900,000 in maintenance of the farm and plant. “It’s been hard work, and not much fun at times,” says Mr Giles. He adds that they began at the right time. The market has grown so that he does not now believe that they could succeed with the corresponding amount of capital (adjusted for inflation) and have any chance of succeeding.