Morton Tonder, General Manager
My name is Morton Tonder, and I am the General Manager at MA Orchards. We use ABCgrower as our hub for managing the crop and the people, payment, productivity, budget, and follow up. That’s ABC, that is at the centre of it all.
In 2018 we were still using a paper record, and I was spending a little time searching for systems because back home in Denmark where I came from that was all already IT based. So, I looked at a couple of options and one of them was ABC, and after quite a lot of research we found out that ABC was the right place for us.
Obviously, the harvest is the peak; it’s the pinnacle of what we do all year, but it’s also where we’ve got the most staff. We have about 450 people coming in and it’s a small team of 17 permanent staff that are training, employing, paying, and organizing all the staff to come in and pick the crop: 16,000 bins in 3 weeks.
Luke Upfold, Production Manager
My name is Luke Upfold. I’m the Production Manager here at MA Orchards. My job is to look after the staff that are involved in production activities like picking, pruning, thinning, and those kinds of things.
We grow Honeycrisp which is a high value apple variety that we export to the United States. We grow our trees high density. We know how many meters of branch we have in this orchard. We know how many buds we have in this orchard. And we do everything by the numbers. We use ABC for just about everything that we do that is work related.
Carla Clelland, Technical Manager
Hi, my name is Carla Clelland. I’m the Technical Manager for MA Orchards. The Technical Manager does a lot of things. A lot of my work is around crop estimation, in terms of how we’re going to grow the volume of fruit that we need for our customers and obtaining the correct quality for that fruit also. ABCgrower helps us a huge amount. I’m not sure how we would do it without that level of detail and information.
[ABCgrower] also helps us a lot with our compliance work. It fits in quite nicely with our traceability systems on the orchard. We use ABCgrower throughout the year. Everything from spraying for our agrochemical instructions through to tracking inventory. It’s a really integral part of our business.
MA Orchards produces a very large number of bins of fruit each season. ABC is the tool that we use to preprint our labels and then, as they’re applied to the harvested bins they’re scanned in, and that gives us a full traceability system right back to where that fruit has been picked which ticks all of our compliance requirements. And also for planning when we need to order trucks and cool storage space. It gives us the full picture of where that fruit is and where it has come from which is absolutely fantastic.
Morton: We also use ABC as a coolstore management system. The whole store has been setup in ABC with row, location and column, and we scan it into these locations using the same barcode system.
When we decided to use ABC, we found Sharon [Chapman] and the team very responsive to changing data and systems, so it fitted us in a good way.
