Piñata Farms, Australia's largest pineapple producer, has started the harvest at the Northern Territory's biggest pineapple farm, which continues to expand towards year-round production.
Operations manager Stephen Scurr said the company learnt a lot from last year's average harvest, and was impressed with this year's crop, as the fruit size has improved.
Mr Scurr said there was now more than 1.1 million pineapple plants on the farm at Humpty Doo, south of Darwin, and the company was pushing ahead with its expansion plans.
"Our original plan was to give it three years, so planting around 15 acres a year and see how it performs," he told ABC Rural.
"But after our first year we felt that we had potential here, so we doubled that and we'll double it again.
"We believe we could do pineapples all-year-round here, and that's our next aim, to keep extending our season out.
"This year we'll go from February through to August and next year, we'll probably extend that [season] out even further, and maybe the following year we'll hopefully [be harvesting] across 12 months."
The fruit is sold in local supermarket and will also be sent to Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne.
