Seeing the first fresh asparagus of the season land in the supermarket is a treat for most of us. Alongside strawberries it's the taste of summer on the way.
Asparagus is versatile, goes with any meal, and can be cooked and ready to serve in minutes.
During the height of the season, the spears can literally grow right before your eyes - up to 17 centimetres a day.
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Waikato asparagus grower Andrew Keaney says while asparagus is easy to grow, harvesting is done by hand making it not only back-breaking but incredibly labour intensive.
Keaney tells Nine to Noon the unusual weather this spring has made life interesting for growers of this short-season crop,
“Like the rest of the country, we've pretty much had everything that spring can throw at us. We've had some beautiful sunny days and some wet cold days, and we've even had a frost.
“So, it's been a really challenging year in terms of what the climate is thrown at us. But we're hoping that the weather will settle down for the next couple of weeks. And we can finish the season strongly with some beautiful asparagus on the shelves for another month at least.”
When asparagus is planted it remains unharvested for the first three years, he says.
“We basically let it grow into fern, mow it down, let it grow into fern again second season, do the same things third season, we might pick it for a couple of three weeks, and then let it grow into fern with the idea that you let all the energy go into the crown's underneath the ground to get them fully established.
“And then basically from the sort of fourth year onwards, we'd like to sort of pick it for the whole season, which is between 90 and 118 days here in New Zealand.”
Its season maybe short but it’s incredibly fast growing, Keen says
“Asparagus is an amazing vegetable it can grow up to 17 centimetres in a day in optimal conditions not normal conditions. And, as I say, and that's and that's, great for us as growers because it means that, you know, we can pick it every day, and it produces a good crop. But it also has its challenges.
“Because when it's growing that quickly, if we don't stay on top of the crop and harvest all of our blocks every day, then the blocks get away from us and we can actually lose some of our production because once it goes past a certain point, the spears start to open up and go seedy and it's really, really hard to get on top of it at that point.
In Waikato alone, they need sufficient labour to harvest 1 million spears a day – all by hand.
Automation, however is being looked at, he says. The industry has partnered with Ministry of Primary Industries and a company called Robotics Plus to really look at developing a robotic harvester, he says.
“I think it's a number of years away, we’re a year or two into what is a five-year project. But I suspect it's probably going to take us at least 10 years before we can get a commercially viable option that our growers can afford.
“The indications are that that one harvester can pick up to 10 hectares in a day. So, if we look at our own, our own asparagus business, we've got about 165 hectares, so that would be 16 robots that would need to have operating in the Waikato just to cover our farms.
The cost of those robots is prohibitive at this stage, he says.
“It's still cheaper to pick it by hand if we can get the labour.”
Staffing is always a problem, he says, given the nature of the crop.
“In our little business in the Waikato, we go from having a full time staff of three in our business meeting up to about 250 people to pick and pack the asparagus throughout the season.
“So really, really challenging and a seasonal crop that is so heavily reliant on labour to get as I say go from sort of three to 250 overnight. Our business we're pretty lucky we're very well supported by the local Cambridge community and the wider Waikato area so we've been lucky we've had enough we could certainly do with more but we've had enough to get by this season.”
