('COUNTRY CALENDAR' THEME) - (WHISTLES) - Always a favourite on every rural road... (DOG BARKS) - I think it's a real win-win situation. It's a win for the viticulture sector, farmers, environment. - It's an innovative solution to recycle broken vineyard posts. - I'm not OCD but, you know, to go from a messy pile over there to a tidy pile, it feels really good. - Instead of going to landfill, they're destined for farms nationwide. Captions by Frank Gore. Edited by Tom Clarke. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2024 - Greg and Dansy Coppell always wanted their children to enjoy a rural lifestyle. - Aesthetically, it's a beautiful place, and that's what drew us to wanna purchase it. It's not, probably, the most productive place and will never be; but for us, it's a lifestyle. - The river is a favourite spot for Freddie and Fergus and their baby sister, Bonnie. - We go to the river throughout the year. You know, in summer the kids are splashing around and looking for eels and generally having a hoot of a time. And then in winter, we still go down there and just enjoy time. - CHILD: This is not bad. - It'll be chilly. Oh, it'll be chilly as. - Really, being British, I just love a good season change. You know, the leaves are dropping and they're all different colours, and I just absolutely love autumn, it's a beautiful time of year for our family. For me, it actually relates directly to slow down, recharge the batteries and enjoy family time a lot more. (LAUGHS) - You reckon? - In 2018, the couple had the chance to buy a farm in St Arnaud, about an hour south of Nelson. It was a big decision. - I think we're suckers for punishment, but I love it. Get back. (WHISTLES) Heel! - When we were growing up, Mum and Dad were farming and doing it bloody hard, but we had a bloody good upbringing and set us up for life, really, and I'd like to do the same for our kids. - Six years ago, Greg was working as a builder and Dansy was pregnant with their second child. - For me at the time I just thought, 'Oh, Greg, what have you done?' From the debt to the... I knew the time he'd have to invest in it. Spider-Man or Iron Man? - Spider-Man. - Um, Sp` Iron Man. - But actually, in hindsight, it's the best thing we've ever done as a family. Everyone that comes and visits us just says this is one of those beautiful places, and it's our little slice of paradise. So I love it now, and I'm really glad Greg coaxed me into it. (LAUGHS) (BIRDSONG) (SOFT MUSIC) - We're in the Upper Buller catchment. We're about 600m above sea level. She's pretty tough and pretty cold up here. It's 500ha sheep and beef, probably around about 350 or 360 effective. So that's partial grazing. We got about 100ha of indigenous bush, and then regenerating hill country and some wetlands amongst there too. - To make the farm easier to manage and more productive, Greg and his father, Alan, put in laneways and made the paddocks smaller. They couldn't afford 30km of new fencing, so Alan came up with an idea. - Well, I decided to tell Greg we need to get down to Blenheim and get a lot of broken vineyard posts, and cos I knew there was thousands of them down there. So we eventually did that, and we went and got a load of over 800 posts. And before we knew it, they were in the ground and we had to go and get more loads. - The posts were free, but they had to manually remove around a dozen nails, clips and screws from each one. It saved them $90,000, but it wasn't easy work. - It's pretty diabolical. There's a few broken hammers and a few that have been biffed 100m down banks and stuff like that, but, um... Yeah, I went from using hammers to then grinding them off and doing different stuff, but it wasn't actually that long. Probably about on our third truckload, that's when we started getting into building a mechanical one, cos we still had a lot to do, and I could see the pain that was ahead of us if we carried on pulling them manually. - I got a lot of stuff I hauled, and pulled out some hydraulic rams and shortened them up, and steel and stuff and got it all to work. Used that one for a little bit to see whether it was gonna continue working or not. Then I went and built another one, set it up in Blenheim and got cracking with it. So the principle worked. - I think it's running a bit slow, Tom. I think it's just got like` The oil's cold, I think. What do you reckon? - Uh, I think we'll probably start... - They had an engineer improve the design, and then Repost was rolled out commercially. - The reason the business started was because we were trying to help family and friends who, you know, needed to fence their farm, needed to do on-farm maintenance, but couldn't afford brand-new posts. And from then, it was a friend and a friend and a friend, and word of mouth got out. - They soon realised they were on to something big. Most vineyards use timber posts, and many are broken during harvesting. - Marlborough's about 35,000ha, so the biggest region, and they snap about 3% to 5%. So we're talking roughly around about a million-odd posts damage in Marlborough every harvest. It's a huge amount. When they go along, they'll shake. Sometimes they'll fracture just from the shaking alone. Sometimes it might get clipped by a machine. So, either it'll get snapped that way, or it might be the side-to-side motion. - As you can see, it's a pretty old vineyard, so... probably be a few in here. - And this is where Stu Dudley from the local wine industry comes in. - People have been looking for literally almost decades trying to find a solution for the vineyard posts. I mean, we're still putting them in the ground, and it's a big cost these days to get rid of them. So having a recycle option for a treated timber post is just the obvious solution. Lucky enough to have a lot of connections in the wine industry, and knew everyone was having similar problems to the company I was working with, so we just put two and two together and, yeah, it was great for someone, like, outside the industry to come in with the solution that he has. - With the help of Stu getting on board, we quite quickly learnt a lot about the viticulture industry, and a lot about how big this waste issue is and how happy they were when we brought this waste solution to them. - Now, they've managed to turn a problem into a business, benefiting the wine industry, farmers and the environment. (GENTLE MUSIC ENDS) (SLIDE GUITAR MUSIC) - Greg and Dansy Coppell's Repost business is a familiar sight on vineyards around Marlborough. - We run mobile units because of logistics. It all made sense just to be fully mobile, go to site, process, load it on a truck and send it out to the country. It's a hell of a lot less emissions and logistics around that. - Their two custom-built trailers have everything needed to process the posts. - There's our nail pullers, is the main thing, with the drop saws and generators and hydraulic pumps. What we're doing is, uh, they're full of clips and nails. This one's pretty stock standard. It's just got plastic clips and nails. Some have tech screws, some have 6-gauge nails. It's a mixed bag. This is pretty clean post, but it pulls pretty well. Hopefully pull a side at a time. Sometimes it doesn't. You'll pull one, and hopefully pick up the rest. And on to the saw. We should be grading, working out what we're gonna get out. That looks` That's good. That's a good post, that. That's gonna go 1.8, no problem. Chop the end, waste in the bin. And... that's it, simple as that. It's gone from an ugly post to something that looks like a brand-new post. - And it should last for decades. - It's a minimum of 50 years. Our testing has come back, and that's what it's saying. All right, Lesley, um, I think we've done about 10,000 so far. There's probably another 25,000, 30,000 still to go. - I can't believe how many you've got through in just three weeks. - It's all good. - Impressive. - Lesley Boon is a manager with one of the country's largest wine producers. - The broken vineyard posts are a big problem, both for Pernod Ricard and the wider industry. Up until now, there's been no sustainable solution for getting rid of them, so we've just been stockpiling them on the vineyard, and every year we're adding to that problem with hundreds of thousands of more posts across the district that have nowhere to go. - Most vineyard posts are treated with arsenic, chromium and copper to stop them rotting. They're not meant to be burnt, and they're expensive to dump. - Honestly, I thought it was super exciting, because here's a couple that have created a business model to solve two problems. So they're taking a waste stream of ours in the vineyard, and they're turning it into a resource, which is fantastic. And for once, we've got a solution that is sustainable and viable for us to use. - The way it works is ` vineyards pay Repost about 80% of what it costs to dump the posts. They see it as money well spent. - This is the solution that we've been waiting for for years, basically. We always have a sustainable mindset. It's one of our core values ` to try and make sure that we reuse and recycle, and, you know, we don't send anything to landfill that doesn't have to go. (SLIDE GUITAR MUSIC) - If we just put two bundles, yeah, about halfway down the deck, so Liam can load on the top, and then we'll start the trailer. - How many rows on the trailer? - Oh, it'll be six rows. - Righto, champ. - Yep, OK. Yep, thank you. - The recycled posts are sold to farmers for $3.25 each, about half what they'd normally cost. - We send them all nationwide, but we got some orders in Pahiatua ` we have a stockpile there ` and the rest of the unit's going to Taupo. - And sales are going well. - We're about 600-odd-thousand to date, but we're really ramping up. We're doing about 30-odd-thousand a month now. So, um, yeah, that has scaled up quite considerably. - So get one more on and we have 26. Just grab one more, Liam. They're quite dry ` so they look a couple of years old, so they don't weigh a whole lot. We got 26 on the truck, hoping to get 42 on the trailer and chain it all up and, yeah, head for the ferry. Hopefully get a second life. - As operations manager for Repost, Liam Garlick is in charge of the loading. - Definitely been trial and error. Well, I've been doing it for over a year now, but we started with a tractor with forks and it was about` probably about a good half a day doing it, and we've got it down to hour an and a half, two hours, yeah. - It feels blimmin' good. I'm not OCD, but, you know, to go from a messy pile over there to a tidy pile, it feels really good, you know. It shows that the stock is really good quality. So what a waste it was going to landfill. It feels really good because, you know, it's circular economy, and I know it's gonna help a lot of farmers out there that otherwise wouldn't be able to do on-farm work. But also to me, it represents the hard work we've put in, from the nail pullers to the guys that we have on board, to the general wider team. Like, this represents the hard work and determination to really get this going. (TRUCK HORN HONKS) There were times where we could have just gone, 'This isn't working,' but, you know, look at us now. And look at this. I mean, it talks volumes, doesn't it, really ` literally volumes. (LAUGHS) - Today, they're also delivering a smaller load to a local farmer about 45 minutes away. - We're just shooting up to see Willie Milton, who's got a couple of blocks in the back of Ward. He's been using quite a few of our posts on some different projects, some around forestry, and others just general subdivision and replacement fencing. It's always good to talk to the farmers, because they're so stoked to get such a cheaper alternative to brand-new fence posts. It's huge cost savings, so, you know, he just keeps coming back for more and more. But I'm just gonna drop a few posts off to him today to finish a little bit he's doing, and just generally just to catch up with him and see what other things he's got in the pipeline. - Just like Greg, Willie used to get broken vineyard posts himself and pull out the nails by hand. - We've done a lot of fencing with vineyard posts. It went well, but so time-consuming. You get them home and you're stripping out nails and everything out of them, and it's a job no one really wants to do. It's pretty time-consuming and labour-intensive. - Hey, fella. How ya going? - Greg, you well? Good. - Blowin' a bit. - Windy. Windy Ward. Yeah. - Where do you want these? - Just here's good. You beauty. - Now Willie buys from Repost. He's already used the posts to fence off a forestry block and is buying more. - Just purely that, really ` the convenience, pretty cost-effective, and they turn up ` Greg and the guys bring them out. So, yeah, it's a pretty good outcome, yeah. Per post, had to work out, and it was about` we were saving about $7.50 per post Repost versus new posts, and, um... over 600 to 700 posts, that was a significant saving, yeah. So... And it all helps at the moment, the way farming is currently. Yeah. - Repost takes up a lot of Greg's time and energy, but the farm is his happy place, and there's work to do. (SLIDE GUITAR MUSIC) (GURGLING MONSTER ON TV) DAD: Hey, hey, guess what? I just got another scam text from the 'power company'... ...saying I need to pay my bill. $156.32. MOM: What Grant?! Final notice... What? Threatening to cut my power... ...think I came down on the last... (ELECTRICITY CUTS DOWN) Oh, is that a fuse, Grant!? JADE: That might be real Dad. Yes it might. VOICEOVER:We're blocking more scams than ever before. One New Zealand, let's get connected. That bit might be real, Dad. - Back at Greg and Dansy Coppell's farm near St Arnaud, south of Nelson, shearing's in full swing. - (WHISTLES) - Get up there, girl. Get back up there, girl. (DOG BARKS) - Over the last couple of weeks, we've been shearing pretty much all sheep got on the property. Started with lambs. They need to be shorn before they go to the stall market down in Marlborough. So we pump those out, replacement ewes, then all the mixed-age ewes ` so 1000 mixed age and probably about 700-and-something lambs. - The Perendale wool is normally used for outer clothing, carpets and furnishings. But these days, it doesn't leave the farm. - For the last three years, we've been loading it on this truck and taking it up the hill and dumping it and composting it. - Like many strong-wool farmers, Greg isn't paid enough to make shearing worthwhile. This way, he employs fewer shed hands and saves on transport. It's a decision that makes economic sense, but it's tough emotionally. - I've had these conversations at different events with the older guys, and they're pretty disheartened and almost given up on wool, and it's been their whole careers really. I still have faith. That's the reason I'm not changing my sheep breeds. And I believe, from an environmental aspect, it is a great fibre and we should be using more of it and replacing other synthetics. It is gonna come right. I love wool. I like everything about it, really. So, it's a great product and we need to fall back in love with it, and we need to get a better price. - Greg says composting puts the minerals and nutrients in the wool back into the land ` another saving, because it means buying less man-made fertiliser. - Me and Dad have discussed it quite a lot. It's for the foreseeable future, and we're putting it into our system, and we're gonna build machinery to help us spread this a lot easier, into our workings. It's not as depressing for me as it is for the old man, but, um, yeah, it's heartbreaking. - He reckons the benefits can be seen in the paddock. - I still put conventional fertilisers, but it's just the fact that it just adds so much value and microorganisms and just gets worms and everything just working so well. This will break down over the next 12 months-plus, and, yeah, just slow release and just keep everything chipping along really nicely. (IDYLLIC MUSIC) - Many of Greg and Dansy's family help with the farm, the business and the children. Bringing them together is a chance to say thanks. - I don't think we'd be doing what we're doing without family support. I mean, from Pop helping Greg with the farm and, you know, teaching him his ways of doing things from yesteryear, to when Repost really got up and running, Pop putting his hand up and say, 'Don't worry, son, I can do this.' - We couldn't do what we're doing without our family. I got five brothers and sisters. Granny and Pop are in town. We have Dansy's mother as well, and, um... Yeah, they fill all the voids when I'm not around. - All right, tucker's up, everyone. Help yourselves. - To Dansy and I, family is everything. It's so important. And at the end of the day, it's just so nice seeing everybody so happy and doing so well at life. So to see them all discuss what's going on in their lives, it's so cool. - For me with my mum helping with the kids so that I can juggle it all, you know, there is the saying 'it takes a village', and I think this is a true, you know, example of that. We wouldn't be doing what we're doing without everybody's help. - This place, yeah, this is my happy place. I'll get back here and switch off and just get back into farming, and it's a really good relax and reset for me, this place. - After six years' hard work, there's time for reflection. - It's actually probably one of the most challenging periods of our lives. Like, having one kid was quite easy, plus a business. And then I took on two kids, two businesses, and then three kids and three businesses, um, but, yeah, we've come out the other side, really and... - I like that that. - ...I think we're probably in a really good space now. (PHONE LINE RINGS) I used to hear, you know, Dansy makes me look good; and behind every bloke, there's a woman that's probably working twice as hard as him, and that's the case here ` Dansy makes me look good. She's the one that's dotting the I's. PHONE: How are you going? - Hey, babe. I'm just checking with that ad. It's 1.2mm and 900mm for those buttons, eh? Just before I send it off. - Uh, yep. Yeah, that's... - I think there's something to be said about knowing your skill sets, knowing what works well for you and driving that. So I think Greg is just hands-on, grassroots, getting that done, and I'm a bit more behind the scenes, and we work as a team. We actually really complement each other, and it's taken us a while to find that flow, and now we've got it. - Repost already operates in Hawke's Bay, but plans to expand further ` other regions, new products and selling through retail outlets, but most importantly, they want their staff to succeed. - We are growing a heap of people too at the same point, that they can take over what we're doing and they can steer it in whatever way they see fit. So the likes of our managers and our staff, they can, I think, with their vision and the way they're passionate about it, there's no reason they can't take it to the next level, and we can just slide back up the valley here and carry on doing what we're doing or move on to a new venture. (TRANQUIL MUSIC) - By the end of this year, we will have sold over 6000km worth of fence line. So that's approximately about 700,000 posts ` which, to me, is just mind-boggling. Every farmer that gets them just gets more, so it's just a really rewarding feeling. - I just feel bloody good because we're just making such a big impact here, a lot more than I thought I could achieve. You know, I'm a farmer from St Arnaud. I thought I was just gonna, you know, grow protein, really, but here I am down in Marlborough and repurposing a hell of a lot of volume out of landfill. It's incredible, really. (TRANQUIL MUSIC) (MUSIC FADES) - (CALLS TO DOGS) - Next time ` - It's been awesome to be back on the farm, and always wanted to come home. - they're adding value to their wool... - That's a good-looking yoga mat, isn't it? - ...and they're looking towards the next generation. - We're blessed with this wonderful asset, but it doesn't come with any cash. - Yeah, I know. It bloomed so much. - It's a true family business. - That's next time on Hyundai Country Calendar.