Australian apple farmers upbeat about prospects of growing Asian export market

Dane Griggs, the orchardist behind the 'mutant' Rubigold apple variety.

Tasmanian apple growers in Australia are upbeat about the prospects of a growing Asian export market, following the sale of the first Australian apples direct to Shanghai in China.

The state's biggest apple grower has sent 200 boxes of Royal Gala apples to an online company in China, which delivers the apples direct to the customer's door.

Tasmania's biggest export advantage over the rest of Australia's apple growers is its fruit fly-free status.

"There are more and more very, very wealthy people in China and they are taking their food safety so seriously that they will consider paying a little bit more for something that they know has been grown in a very safe environment," grower Howard Hansen said.

Australian Farmer of the Year Tim Reid was instrumental in securing the way for Tasmania to export direct into the Chinese market.

"I was personally involved in the discussions with China to open the markets for apples about 20 years ago and the protocol that we were able to negotiate was not really commercially viable," he said.

"It's only been recently - in the last three years - we've had a re-negotiation of the protocol that has made it commercially viable.

"So now the opportunity opens up just at the right time as the market is actually emerging."

Mr Hansen says exporting to an online retailer allows growers to remain competitive despite higher labor costs.

"They are the biggest apple producers in the world and their labor cost is 1 per cent of the cost of ours so it makes no sense," he said.

"But in this situation we are going to an online retailer, so there is only one margin between us and the end consumer, so we are not sharing the margin with exporters, with importers, with the wholesalers distributors.

"So we are more likely to attain a price that will allow us to still make a margin even though we are doing it in a less competitive country in terms of labour costs."

Asian buyers interested in new 'mutant' varieties

Fruit Growers Tasmania president and apple orchardist Andrew Scott says interest in the apples continues to grow.

"We've managed to export fruit in some capacity every year. There is not one year when we haven't done one container just to keep our hand in I guess and keep the wheels turning," he said.

He has sent a container of his new variety, the Tiger Fuji, to Hong Kong.

Sixth-generation orchardist Dane Griggs has sent a new variety of apple, the Rubigold.

The rich, ruby-red skin of the Rubigold is the perfect colour for the Asian market, which likes its apples red.

"I suppose you'd classify this as a sort of bug mutation of the variety that was there and it's all happened naturally - it hasn't been done in ... a nursery or anything ... with the pollen change and so forth," he said.

"It just occurred in nature so we found it and we thought 'Yes, we'll have a go at that'.

"The only way you can prop it is to graft the wood, you can't just keep planting seeds. So we did that and it's sort of grown from a stick of wood that long to where we are now with about 800 bins."

However, exporting is still not a big money earner for Tasmanian growers.

Mr Scott says the loss of a direct shipping service between Tasmania and Asia has been a nightmare for orchardists trying to get exports moving.

"The Australian dollar has been a huge impact. The lack of shipping out of Tasmania, when we lost that, that really impacted on exports," he said.

"You could almost make exports breakeven when the dollar went, [but] when we lost shipping as well that sort of just made it totally unviable to do so.

"Hence a lot of the growers still growing apples have had to try and change their varietal base around to a more domestically orientated crop to enable them to sell onto the eastern seaboard of Australia."

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