A devastating hailstorm has destroyed apple and kiwifruit crops in Tasman district, wiping out orchard incomes, and staff are already being laid off.

The hail hammered the area around Lower Moutere, Motueka and Riwaka, west of Nelson, for 20 minutes from 9.30pm last night, collapsing hail nets and blanketing the ground with hailstones.

Grower Rod Fry described it as "the worst in living memory".

He estimated that 15 to 20 orchards were seriously affected.

"Some places are a complete writeoff. It's chaos, devastating."

This morning he was surveying his 20 hectares of apples and 30ha of kiwifruit, with the hail still on the ground.

"The kiwifruit had just started flowering and now the vines are stripped. The apples are a writeoff."

He was to hold a staff meeting this morning.

Growers across the district would have to reassess their staffing, Fry said.

"Some staff will have to go - there's nothing for them to do. I'm not sure how many long-term staff will be affected."

It would also affect harvest jobs next year, including those of Pacific Island workers brought in under the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme, he said. Last year nearly 1000 RSE workers were employed in the Nelson region.

Fry said most pipfruit growers would have hail insurance, and kiwifruit growers would have insurance of about $2 a tray. However, in many cases it would only cover costs up to now and would not cover the loss of the potential crop.

"It's going to be a skinny year."

The impact would flow on to many others in the community, he said.

Another orchardist, who declined to be named, said he had lost his entire year's income. "You take your salary away for a year and try and live."

Fruit on his 12ha block that was about 12 to 15 millimetres in diameter had been destroyed, and the leaves looked as if a shotgun had been fired through the orchard, he said. The hail was still underneath his trees 10 hours later.

He said John Mathieson of Nelson Weather Service had accurately forecast the hail, but there was nothing growers could do but pray.

The pipfruit industry is worth about $150 million each year to the region, and kiwifruit about $22m.

The hail was "a bloody disaster", said Steve Moriarty, operations manager for Enza's 157ha of producing orchards at Riwaka.

Hail nets collapsed under the weight of the hail, which lasted about an hour on and off from 9.30pm, he said.

The hail "started as pea-sized and ended as marble-sized".

"It breaks your heart".

Surveying the damage this morning, Moriarty pointed out a cable that held up a hail net, which had "snapped like a carrot". It had been rigged to take 2.5 tonnes. Trees had also broken under the weight of collapsed nets.

He said his staff would try to save some blocks but others were "completely stuffed. We'll get a digger and pull it all out".

Although it was too early to accurately assess the scale of the damage, he estimated that 65 to 75 per cent of the orchards had been affected. He would be assessing blocks over the next two weeks, and deciding where to try to save the crop by thinning and where to abandon it.

Lower Moutere orchardist Ian Palmer said two of his four blocks had hail insurance, but he knew growers who did not have it, and they would be in "serious trouble".

He compared it a hailstorm 18 years ago, also on November 4, which wiped out his crop. The same freakish weather had destroyed what was then the Inglis hop farm at Riwaka, where the hail had come from the west and lasted for an hour, compared to a more typical five-minute hailstorm.

Even at 9am today, the hail was 10 centimetres thick on the ground in parts of Riwaka. Inspecting the damage was engineer Nathan Gibbs, who lives next door to Enza orchards. He said his neighbour had been skiing down Swamp Rd, which was completely white, at 11.30pm.

Source - http://www.stuff.co.nz/