Our Biosecurity Symposium took place last week and was hugely successful, with over 100 attendees enjoying presentations, demonstrations, networking, and a response exercise.

Supported by Biosecurity New Zealand, the exercise focused on one of our most unwanted pest threats, the Spotted Lanternfly (SLF). Teams responded to detections of SLF eggs on an orchard in Te Puke and focussed on the roles and responsibilities of specific teams/functions in a response, and how these align with – and are contributed to – by the industry’s KiwiNet network.

At tables, groups took on the roles of logistics, operations, and public information teams, learning more about what each of these is responsible for day-to-day during a response, and how each interacts with the Response Controller and Response Governance.

There are too many presentation highlights to mention, but a crowd favourite was Danny Le Feuvre from the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council, who talked through the Australian Varroa Mite response successes and challenges, particularly in terms of getting ground operations up-and-running quickly, with large numbers of response staff to assist.

Thank you to everyone who joined us throughout the two days – the KVH team were all delighted to see you in person, and we hope you found the event as worthwhile as we did. It is important to us that we share all the work underway in biosecurity readiness, response, science, and innovation to protect growers and ensure we remain a biosecurity resilient industry.

A special thank you to our event sponsors, without whom we would not have been able to offer the Symposium. Thank you to Plant & Food Research; Onside; Zespri; Fruitfed Supplies; HortiCentre; and the Port of Tauranga for the support and presence throughout the event.

We will have videos from the day available soon, and some articles in the next issue of the Kiwifruit Journal, but in the meantime, you can see some images from the event here.