32 MARCH 2017 FOR MACADAMIAS MANIC Christine Charteris and her husband Bill are the first to admit they’re nut jobs. When the Oakura couple first mooted the idea of growing macadamias on their picturesque 20ha landholding tucked under the shadow of Mt Taranaki’s Kaitake Ranges, tree nuts were on the pointy end of the food pyramid as a treat to have sparingly and people said they were mad to try something that had never succeeded before. That was in 1980, well before nuts were confirmed as a vital food for good health. Ronald Reagan had just been elected US president, the Iraq War was brewing, Mt St Helens was making bubbling noises and someone had just shot JR Ewing on popular soap Dallas. Fast forward 37 years, and you’ll see Christine and Bill with smiles on their faces and a business they are fiercely proud of. These days, the couple run their thriving spray-free business emacadamia, growing and processing macadamias and processing imported nuts for a client base spread across the country that includes Aunt Betty’s, Skycity and Blanket Bay Luxury Lodge. It seems a lifetime ago that they put in a trial of 250 mainly Beaumont macadamia trees in soil they knew grew good Rewarewa (honeysuckle) trees which are also part of the Proteaceae family that the macadamia belongs to. The trouble was, the plants grew and flowered but didn’t produce good quality fruit, so the couple swapped to kiwifruit. “We’d been told over and over again that macadamias would be impossible to grow in Taranaki, and any setback could be massive,” Charteris says. “People said we couldn’t grow macadamias so far south. We didn’t agree…the ‘e’ in our name stands for energy, but we really were a little low on it for a while.” The catalyst for change occurred in 1988, when Cyclone Bola hit. For those who lived through the ferocious storm, it pummelled Taranaki like no other region. The kiwifruit trees were devastated as the south-easterly wind funnelling down through the gap between the Pouakai and Kaitake Ranges blew everything away. Three years of production was lost, and it was then that the couple decided to go back to macadamias. “We wanted to offer something really different though,” Charteris says now. “We were quite clear that in order to be successful, we needed to produce gourmet products and ingredients. In New Zealand, most nuts are sold in plastic bags under fluorescent lights, in sunshine, exposed to natural light, oxygen, moisture and heat. “We knew that macadamias needed to be treated sensitively like milk…with very little additional flavour or preservative – made to order and fresh. However, having that kind of philosophy means
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