Prime Movers sector report: Rural contracting

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON

When John Austin got his first tractor-driving job 28 years ago as a teenage school leaver, it was common for several farmers in a district to share machinery and do much of their own ploughing, crop sowing and harvesting.

Contractors were often one-man bands who worked the farms outside the neighbourhood collective, or which didn't have the workers to do the job.

From his rural Waikato headquarters at the heart of a humming empire of high-tech equipment in the office and on the land, Austin reflects that increasing farm size and the complexity of machinery have fuelled changes.

Where it once took two people to milk 70 cows, improved milking systems now mean one person can milk 200. But that also means there are no extra staff to do some of the jobs on the farm.

As well, the specialist technology - and the price - of today's big rigs make them an uneconomic investment on many a farm where they could spend much of the year idle.

A recent survey of farmers also shows that a shortage of farm workers is forcing many of them to call in the contractor. In the survey, 30 per cent of respondents said they used rural contractors more because they couldn't get enough staff of their own.

What is also clear from Austin's operation is that contracting has developed into a highly professional, stand-alone industry with a breadth of specialist technology that few besides the truly dedicated could successfully grasp.

If not already here, the time seems close when farmers will concentrate on getting the best from their livestock while the contractor gets the best for them from their crops.

Keen to get his hands on some of the farm machinery he loved so much, Austin started working for his friend and mentor, contractor Peter Hoar, as a 16-year-old.

Hoar recalls when Austin asked for a job while still at school, he told him he didn't want to employ a "nincompoop." He advised the boy to ensure he was proficient in maths, English and bookkeeping.

After Hoar took him on, Austin spent the next five years living with Hoar and his wife Dorothy. He became "like a son and the hardest-working employee we'd ever had."

"You have to stop him working," Hoar said.

In 1980 aged 21, Austin bought Hoar's business of a tractor and a combine harvester servicing around 20 clients with 500ha of maize. As maize planting spread over the following 10 years the tractor fleet grew to five.

More than two decades later Austin has 800 to 1000 clients with 4300ha of maize - about half the company's workload - and a staff of 44 which seasonally grows to 70.

He has around $8 million worth of machinery including 22 tractors, three forage harvesters, two combine harvesters, four maize planters, three sprayers, seven trucks and a range of cultivation, planting and harvesting equipment for grass, maize and other forage crops.

Three mechanics are employed full-time to maintain the machinery.

The work ranges over crop and pasture spraying, fertiliser spreading, ploughing and cultivation, precision planting maize for grain and silage, drilling pasture, cereals and brassicas, harvesting grain and silage, round baling and wrapping for silage or hay, and peat-land development.

Tractors are guided by GPS systems to and around paddocks, and harvesters use yield monitors or imaging displays that show the crop yield from different paddocks, or parts of a paddock.

Yield maps of grain harvests are sent to farm owners who can use the information to identify yield-limiting factors and where they can be altered through a change of seed use, or by drainage, weed control or fertiliser.

One farmer found his maize crop was so poor from one part of a field that his best option was to fence it off and plant it in pine trees.

There's no doubt that Austin is at the top of his field. In June he beat 19 other contestants to be named Contractor of the Year at the Rural and Associated Contractors Federation annual conference.

It's the second time the award has been held as the industry moves to promote its professionalism.

Judges, including Ian Yule, head of Massey University's precision agriculture centre, spent six days visiting each operation to judge them on public relations and customer service, staff training, health and safety plans, financial management and company policy or philosophy.

Afterwards Yule said the judges found it inspiring to see the passion with which the contractors pursued their work.

The winner's prize of a trip to Europe to visit award sponsor New Holland's factory is right up Austin's alley. He has made it a policy to visit either the United States or Europe annually to check the latest machinery or discuss methods with northern hemisphere contractors.

"You can get worn down with the day-to-day work," he says.

"When you can discuss and find improved ways to do your business you come back with more enthusiasm."

Austin said one of his main motivations for entering the competition was to prove to his staff how good they were. It has proved a significant morale booster.

He worried he might fall victim to the tall poppy scythe but was "pleasantly surprised" to find that customers, too, were proud of the firm's achievement.

As gratifying as the win was, however, Austin takes even more pride in his company achieving ISO certification in February, the first rural contractor in the association, and possibly the country, to do so.

With the business growing, Austin said he was keen to ensure that it offered a consistently quality service. He tried writing his own manuals but they became technical rather than operational.

He chose ISO accreditation because he liked the idea that the processes it involved provided a guarantee of consistent quality. The company spent 18 months working towards February's certification and last month passed its first audit.

The company's office systems, run from premises among grassy fields south of Te Awamutu, are far removed from the pencil-toting contractor writing up jobs in an exercise book after the nightly ring around on the home telephone. The complex operation of dispatching drivers and machinery all around the Waikato region is controlled by computers using software designed in-house.

A second-generation order and service delivery system has just been set up which is so revolutionary that Austin is confident of finding a market overseas for its driving software.

One of the next developments will be to enable clients to place their orders over the internet. The company already has its own website.

Austin might spend much of his day driving a desk but he retains the love of machinery that first got him into the business.

The technological development that has so changed the face of farming and contracting in the past 20 years continues apace.

Austin confidently predicts that in the next 12 months vehicle guidance systems will be consigning drivers to roles similar to aircraft pilots.

Auto-piloted tractors will follow exactly the same route around a paddock, doing their programmed task as efficiently as possible while at the same time limiting soil compaction.

The first use for completely cab-less - no driver at all - vehicles in New Zealand could well be around orchards where they would be used for such jobs as pesticide spraying, he said.

If we want to know where farming is heading, we could do worse than look where rural contractors and their equipment are going next.