Rising from the ashes
Imagine this. You’re woken from sleep on a Sunday night to be told your well-established agri supply business is literally in flames.
Rebuild due to be finished soon.
Most stock and equipment is destroyed, and a busy sales season is just around the corner. Insurance should cover a rebuild, but only a part of the plant and stock and not the loss of income. Do you walk away, or start all over again?
“We had never been so well stocked,” says Rurtec owner Ian Carr. “And the updating of insurance cover unfortunately hadn’t happened.
“A main thing that made me say yes, let’s go again, was the LANATI. After three and a half years of development we’d only just launched it. I knew we would be able to get back up and running with new stock pretty quickly.”
He’s talking about the LANATI ASTRON, the unique, slimline, high torque cordless handpiece Rurtec released to market mere weeks before fire consumed its headquarters in Hamilton on 17 December 2023.
Since 2012, the building had served as a manufacturing and distribution base for Rurtec’s animal husbandry products.
In a few weeks, Carr says, he and his team hope to be back in – Waikato Construction is expected to have finished the re-build for a return to business in March.
Before then, however, the company needs to get cracking on crayon supply for the start of autumn mating, and that means having 250,000 crayons ready to go for the NZ and export markets by April.
“We were lucky; when we dug down through the melted mess there were cartons of crayons underneath that were largely untouched aside from being waterlogged from the hoses used to fight the fire. Enough was salvaged to see us through most of the southern hemisphere season. We had to short supply the European market however which was a bit hard to swallow,” Carr says.
The vats used to make the crayons were also salvaged, and with the stirrer motors rewound and new heating elements installed they were up and running again in a transportable facility at Rurtec’s temporary site by late November.
New machinery for harness manufacture was purchased and set up at the temporary site in the weeks after the fire, ensuring these were available for both domestic and export sales after stock levels were rebuilt.
Carr says Rurtec customers have been very supportive throughout the recovery process, and have been kept in the loop from soon after the event.
A very positive light throughout has been the market success of the LANATI ASTRON, he says.
Manufactured overseas, these have been selling strongly through NZ retailers and vets for use in both sheep and dairy cattle, for tail trimming.
“As usual, the Southern Field Days at Waimumu in February was a real pleasure and a great event – interest in the ASTRON handpiece was very strong there, and at the CD Field Days in Feilding in March. “We were also helped by Alleva Animal Health, which used them for a promotion with one of their sheep products that went really well.”
There’s strong interest from Australia by way of a large existing cordless handpiece supplier who was looking at developing something similar for its own range, and talks on a distribution deal are underway.
Further afield, Rurtec is also fielding interest from the United States, both for dairy herds and the smaller sheep flocks which prevail in the eastern states.
“We just got it into the UK at the start of November, and we’re pretty excited about that.”
