The largest grapefruit grower in Australia's Northern Territory will soon pull out thousands of trees because the crop is no longer profitable.
Sevenfields has 10,000 red-fleshed grapefruit trees at Katherine, but poor consumer interest and a lack of demand from overseas have made it tough for the company to continue with the crop.
Manager Tom Armstrong told the ABC the company could not produce the quality of fruit expected by the domestic market.
"Those ones there are too small for market specifications, and the majority of the other ones that are rejected are too big for market specifications," he said. "The fruit is beautiful but they won't buy it."
On the other side of the West Australian border, however, Rewards Group, with 80,000 red grapefruit trees in Kununurra, is busy harvesting this season's crop and is committed to opening new markets for their fruit.
The company's Mano Babiolakis disagrees with Mr Armstrong, and believes there is a market out there for red-fleshed grapefruit.
"We've scaled back our exports this year because we haven't been as competitive as we wanted to be," he told Fruitnet.com.
"We're not exporting as much we wanted, but domestically we're doing well because we have a significant volume of fruit that the buyers are looking for.
"Our markets aren't closing, it's more a case of not being able to get new ones open quickly enough.
"Japan is the one that we're pushing for, and we were hoping to have market access finalised this year, but this hasn't been the case.
"We're very close though, and we are now in the public consultation period, where Japan can raise any objections to the importation of Australian grapefruit.
"We're positive that access will happen sooner rather than later, and we've set our last departure date to the 10 May, which we're hoping to still achieve. If we do, we'll try and get one or two containers over to Japan this year. If not, we'll start from scratch next year."
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