Career story

Horticultural consultant

Whether she's testing for pests, analysing fruit quality or meeting clients, Carla Emms is enjoying every moment of her position as a horticultural consultant. With varied hours, an assortment of workplaces and numerous problems to solve, Carla's work ensures that no two days in a row are the same.

"It's a job where you put in 120 percent from October through to May," she says. "A skill you really need is time management. You also need to be able to problem solve. You don't learn everything from the textbook; you need to apply principles to the current situation.

"Say a client's got a problem with a tree. You can't just look in a textbook and say, 'Oh, that's that pest'. Some nutrient deficiencies show the same symptoms as some pests, so you could take some samples and analyse the nutrient levels in the fruit, and take other samples and look at them under the microscope."

Carla adds that horticultural consultants need to know about more than crops. "It's not just plants; it's about money and profit as well."

One difficult aspect of the job is when things go wrong financially for clients. In these situations, Carla uses economic models to help her clients. "It's not a pleasant part of the job, but you're there to help them do the best they can," she says. "If the crop's so low it's not worth picking, one of the options could be harvesting it for juice."

Carla also enjoys seeing her work literally come to fruition. "Seeing every crop you've had some input into go through the packhouse - or seeing it as the finished bottle of wine, or the return the grower is getting - that's a real bonus.

"Summer's great! I like the Hawke's Bay heat. It's harvest time, everything builds up to that time and you can see whether you've got a good crop or not, and whether all your work's paid off."