Harvest focus: quality with Gurmeet Singh

The colour on the Bravo® apples is looking good at Gurmeet Singh’s Benipal Orchards in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley when APAL visits in late March. 

Already a dark purple/crimson, Gurmeet is looking to the cooler weather forecast for the coming days for that final finish and the trademark deep burgundy colouring of the ANABP 01 variety sold locally as Bravo and internationally as Soluna™.  

Colour and size are both key to securing the quality-based premium level pricing tiers set by the variety managers Fruit West, but maturity testing is also carried out to ensure a good outcome for consumers. 

“The taste is more important than the colour,” Gurmeet said.  

Grower Gurmeet Singh, Benipal Orchards, checks the colour development and size of his apples ahead of harvest. Photo: Abram Rasmussen, ARC Media

The ANABP 01 are grown as central leaders, at 4m row width x 1.4m tree spacing with around two thirds on MM106 and a third on M26. 

Keeping fruit size in check on the young trees with lighter crop load is a challenge, but last year’s crop packed out at 60–70 per cent Class 1 and achieved the second highest quality tier, returning an average $930/bin (gross sale, before postharvest costs) and this year’s crop looks better again.  

Despite some vigour issues he hopes will settle down on those on MM106, he’s a fan of the apple both for how it performs and how it tastes. 

“It becomes a nice even crop that is easy to handle,” he said. “Then you shouldn’t need to pick colour, you can just strip and it is hard to bruise, it’s tough and it stores well.” 

Gurmeet has been growing apples in the Goulburn Valley for nearly 30 years, after immigrating to Australia from the Punjab region of northern India in 1990 and leasing an orchard prior to buying his own in 1999.  

Bravo® apples on a block of young trees colouring up nicely pre-harvest at Benipal Orchards. Photo: Abram Rasmussen, ARC Media

As well as ANABP 01, Alvina Gala, Granny Smith, high-coloured Pink Lady cultivars and Packham pears are now grown across 28 hectares and two sites at Benipal Orchards. 

All apples are netted against primarily sunburn and birds, but Gurmeet said the (mostly) DrapeNet is also quite effective against codling moth and light brown apple moth, helping to reduce chemical usage. The Packhams will be netted next year. 

This year Packhams will be sent straight to market as Gurmeet prefers the certainty of a current price to the balancing storage costs against an unknown future price. 

“If you keep storing until November, you could pay $100/bin storage and you don’t know if the price will go up or down,” he said. “If we have got $300–350/bin return, we just sell.” 

Close attention to detail is paying off. Although a young orchard yet to reach full production, Gurmeet said it was already covering running costs and delivering some profit after four or five years of spending money on netting and block establishment. 

As his two sons, Devinder and Berinder, have built careers as accountants, while also helping on the orchard, Gurmeet is pragmatic about whether he will be handing on his orchard to family or selling to a fellow grower. Either way, he is clear that maintaining a productive, profitable orchard makes sense. 

“We spend the money because If we grow fruit in the right way we can make money with the fruit,” he said. “And if I want to sell the orchard, we can sell it quickly because the orchard is ready to go.” 

“I’m happy at the moment,” he said. “We’ve spent a lot of money. We are not getting a return on our investment yet, but we are making money. From next year, with bigger crops, we should start to see that come back. 

“At the moment, it’s positive.” 

This article was first published in the Autumn 2025 edition of AFG.