mmg.com.au

The tomato and grape harvest in Rochester and district came to a grinding halt last week due to the heavy rainfall.

Lockington farmer Geoff Wolfe said his tomato paddocks received 40ml of rain in two days and harvest would resume today now the ground was suitable for heavy machinery.

He said he encountered rain in the middle of the harvest many times in his 37 years of tomato farming and it made the job difficult.

‘‘When you are using heavy machinery they just get bogged,’’ he said.

‘‘We just have to battle through it.

‘‘The machine clogs up and we have to pull up and start scraping (the mud off) and cleaning as best we can.’’

Mr Wolfe said most of the water had drained away but the ground was thoroughly soaked.

‘‘If you walked out in it you would sink down to your ankles in mud,’’ he said.

Mr Wolfe, who supplies to Kagome in Echuca, said the tomatoes would need to be harvested within the next 10 days to keep the high standard of fruit.

So far the company has harvested 20 of its 77 hectares.

Rich River Tomatoes owner Paul Monigatti said he was taking a 50 per cent loss on his fruit this week.

He said because the rain prevented further handpicking for the fresh fruit market, he needed to harvest over-ripe tomatoes to sell to Kagome.

Mr Monigatti said he paid the contractor $100 a half-tonne bin to handpick the tomatoes but only received $100 a tonne from the tomato processing company.

He said although suffering a loss it was better to remove the unwanted fruit from the paddock and receive some money rather than letting them over-ripen and destroy the tomato paddock.

Mr Monigatti said harvesters took two days off due to the abundance of mud.

‘‘Mud is our biggest problem,’’ he said.

‘‘We can’t travel up and down with trailers for our bins and the tomatoes are washed over 25 brushes, but the mud sticks to them.’’

He gave the go-ahead for the harvest to resume on Thursday but said the ground was still fairly wet.

Corop’s Cooper Estate vineyard manager Don Risstrom said the rain delayed the harvest for five to six days as the excess water lowered the sugar levels which needed to be brought back up before harvesting.

The shiraz and cabernet grape harvest was due to be completed tomorrow but will now take another week.

Mr Risstrom was confident the hot days predicted for this week would benefit the grapes still on the vines.