Australia's macadamia growers remain optimistic about harvest after Debbie

Excessive flooding in macadamia growing regions in Queensland and New South Wales from ex-Cyclone Debbie is not expected to have a detrimental effect on Australia's macadamia crop this year, according to local growers.

The macadamia industry has had to revise its 2017 crop forecast due to damage caused by the wild weather from 54,000 tons to around 52,000 tons after Debbie washed some of the early crop away. Sunshine Coast grower Brett Newell said macadamias were resilient to extreme weather and he did not expect the season to be at risk.

"We won't know how severe those effects will be because we have just starting harvesting," said Jolyon Burnett from the Australian Macadamia Society. Thankfully, many growers are only in the early stages of harvest, and most of their crop is still in the tree."

Despite this setback growers are optimistic about the future as the production of macadamias in Australia has been growing consecutively by 4 to 5 per cent for the past few years. Driven by a huge demand from China, prices for growers are also skyrocketing, and many are racing to plant more trees to keep up with demand.

Mr Burnett said a kilogram of macadamias went from being $1.20 a kilogram a decade ago, to now over $5 per kilogram and rising. In the past four years, 600,000 new trees have gone into the ground and now there are about 5.3 million of them in Australia.

Source: abc.net.au