Australia's blueberry crop held on to its 43% jump. Exports fell 29%, and imports hit a five-year high

The short answer

• Volume held: 28,382 tonnes in the year to June 2025, down 2% (495 tonnes) on 28,877. The 43% jump of the year before was kept, not reversed.
• Value held: $532.2 million, against $529.6 million, a rise of under 1%.
• Exports fell: 766 tonnes of fresh fruit worth $24.6 million, down 29% in volume and 7% in value. That is about 3% of the crop.
• Imports rose: 1,664 tonnes, all from New Zealand, up 27% and the most in the handbook’s five-year table.
• Where it grew: New South Wales 22,413 tonnes, 79% of the national crop.

Those are national and state figures, from the Australian Horticulture Statistics Handbook 2024/25 published by Hort Innovation, whose blueberry section runs from page 52 to page 55 of the fruit volume. The handbook does not publish a figure for Coffs Harbour or the Mid North Coast, and neither do we.

The jump was kept

When we first set out the blueberry numbers in July, the open question was whether a single year’s surge would last. The five-year table on page 53 answers it for one more year. Production ran between about 19,600 and 23,500 tonnes a year from 2021 to 2023, stepped up to 28,877 tonnes in the year to June 2024, and stayed close to that in the year to June 2025. Across the five years, volume is up 21% and value up 29%.

Australian blueberry production and its value, years ending June 2021 to 2025, as published in the Hort Innovation handbook 2024/25, page 53. National totals, not regional. Values are as the handbook prints them; it does not say they are adjusted for inflation, and we have not adjusted them. Drawn by The Headland.

The year before is not the figure readers saw at the time. The 2023/24 handbook put the year to June 2024 at 27,540 tonnes and $505.1 million, up 36%. The 2024/25 edition revises it to 28,877 tonnes and $529.6 million, up 43%, or 1,337 tonnes more. The blueberry pages do not explain the change. The handbook’s berries overview, which totals the berry crops, carries a footnote on page 50: This category has been updated to reflect revised data for previous years. Blueberries also held up better than berries overall: on the same page, total berry production fell 6% to 120,314 tonnes, with value flat at $1,381.1 million, of which blueberries were about 39%.

Exports went backwards

The year to June 2024 looked like the start of an export trade. Fresh exports more than doubled to 1,085 tonnes. In the year to June 2025 they fell to 766 tonnes, still above the 342 to 517 tonnes of 2021 to 2023, but 319 tonnes down. Export value fell less, 7% to $24.6 million, so each tonne exported was worth about 32% more on the handbook’s figures (our arithmetic: $32,100 a tonne against $24,300). The handbook does not say why.

Page 55 breaks the trade down. New South Wales shipped 611 of the 766 tonnes, down from 966. Hong Kong took 404 tonnes, 52.8% of exports, down from 532; Singapore took 187, down from 348. Every imported blueberry came from New Zealand: 1,664 tonnes worth $44.1 million, up 27% in volume. Imports have now exceeded exports in every year of the table, and the gap widened from 224 tonnes to 898, the widest since 2021.

Where the crop goes, and what it is worth

Almost all of it stays here. The supply-chain diagram on page 52 sends 89% of production to the fresh market at home, 9% (2,462 tonnes) to processing and 3% to export. Add the imports and Australia’s fresh supply was 26,818 tonnes, worth $651.6 million at wholesale, up 2%. That works out at 0.98 kilograms a person, essentially unchanged, and 47% of households bought blueberries. Imports were about 6% of that fresh supply.

The handbook publishes values, not prices. Dividing one by the other, the crop was worth about $18,750 a tonne at production in the year to June 2025 against about $18,340 the year before, a rise of about 2%. That is our arithmetic on national totals, not a farm-gate price any grower received.

New South Wales: 79%, and what that does not tell you

Page 54 puts New South Wales at 22,413 tonnes, 79.0% of national production. Victoria grew 1,983 tonnes, Tasmania 1,899, Queensland 1,056, Western Australia 890 and South Australia 141. The page’s map of growing regions marks one place in New South Wales: Coffs Harbour. Its seasonality chart, which carries no key to its shading, shades New South Wales in every month except April and May, while Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia are shaded only from late spring or summer into autumn.

The 2023/24 edition put New South Wales at 23,575 of 27,540 tonnes, about 86%, and said in words that Blueberry production is centered in the northern New South Wales region of Coffs Harbour. The 2024/25 edition does not repeat that sentence. It is tempting to read 86% to 79% as the state losing ground, but the figures cannot carry that. The new edition revised the national total for the year to June 2024 by 1,337 tonnes and did not republish that year’s state split, so we cannot tell how much of the change is real and how much is revision.

Our read

This section is opinion, built on the figures above.

The good news for this coast is the first line of the table. A 43% jump in one year could have been a bumper season. A second year at almost the same level looks like capacity: the industry the Coffs coast anchors is now running about a third bigger than its average for 2021 to 2023, and its value has risen with it.

The export story is the disappointment. A year ago the doubling of exports was the most hopeful sign that the extra fruit could find buyers beyond the domestic shelf. It shrank by more than a quarter, to 3% of the crop, while imports from New Zealand grew to their highest in five years. On these figures, the domestic market is effectively the whole market, and a crop that grows faster than Australians’ appetite for it has nowhere much else to go. The higher value per exported tonne is worth watching: it may mean the fruit that did leave found better-paying buyers, but the handbook does not say, and one year is not a trend.

What we will not do is supply the reasons the handbook leaves out. Weather, prices, freight or growers’ choices could each explain part of this, and the document is silent on all of them. The next edition, for the year to June 2026, is the test: whether the crop holds near 28,000 tonnes, and whether exports recover or settle at this level. We will report it against these numbers when it lands.