Latest News

July 2018: Three of the Dippenaar Choice Fruit farms, Grand View, Bellevue and Weltevrede recently received the “Red Sun Raisin Reward” for excellent raisin quality. (Photo from left to right – Rudi Lombaard, Zarene Smit, AJ Basson)

July 2018: DCF is very pleased with the results of the past harvest despite the the fact that our final figures were 9% lower than the initial September 2017 crop estimate.  The early and new varieties were mostly affected with smaller bunches and berry sizes. The later Thompson Seedless yielded better than estimates and was of very good quality. The [...]

June 2018: Planting season is during our winter months and we are currently planting, both to replace old vineyards and to expand by planting new vineyards on unplanted parts of the farm. The planting programme for 2017 is as follows: LA Grape Farms -  Krissy and Melody blocks are being replaced with Merbein (for raisins) and Joybells. All the old [...]

March 2018: During 2017 we constructed a new pack house on our Bellevue farm and the recent harvest was the first season that the new pack house was operational. Currently the pack house has two active packing lines, but the building has been designed with the space and capacity to add additional lines as the farm’s productions expand and grow. [...]

February 2018: We have recently introduced the use of the DiPar quality management system in two of our pack houses. This system utilises hand held tablets to record real-time quality parameters. This is extremely useful as it allows our quality control team to react immediately when any out-of-specification fruit data is captured and assists our pack house managers to respond [...]