Wool is making money again – and other rural success stories

Newsroom

17-06-2025

Jeffery To was twiddling his thumbs at home during Covid lockdown when he came up with the idea of a robot that could scour our waterways and collect pollution data.
Jeffery To showing The Detail's Sharon Brettkelly the MĀKI boat V2 – Hydrohub, which maps and monitors water quality. Photo: Davina Zimmer
'My wife was getting sick of me being at home all the time,' says the Waikato engineer. 'After watching YouTube I built an autonomous boat that mapped the local lake with the target or vision of cleaning the lake forever.'
In true number eight wire fashion, he built the miniature boat with three PVC pipes and a metal tray, but the technology on board the vessel was groundbreaking and expensive.
He posted his mapping of the lake on social media and caught the attention of Waikato Regional Council.
'They asked me if I would be interested in mapping other lakes. I said certainly. Since then I've learned a lot about water quality in New Zealand, what can we do, what should we do, what is possible.'
To's engineering/technology company, Māki, was one of dozens of exhibitors in the innovation hall at Fieldays last week and a finalist in the Prototype Award.
He tells The Detail the Māki boat is also capable of mapping parts of harbours and the sea around islands that humans cannot reach by car or boat. He has deliberately kept the materials cheap so that councils can afford them, and put the money into the technology that maps and collects data.
'With the engineer background, we first identify how big the problem is. With the boat, we know how bad the problems are. The next thing is finding solutions that can do things in a sustainable way to help with the problem, how do we slow it down,' To says.
Chris Harper is operations manager for KiwiLeather Innovations. Photo: Davina Zimmer
'But in order to reverse it I think there's a lot more work and I hope that with technology and innovation we can help a little bit.'
A few booths away in the innovation hall, Chris Harper explains how the small mats sitting on his display table were concocted in his kitchen from kiwifruit waste.
On the wall behind him are photos of luxury fashion boots and handbags. They are the vision of KiwiLeather Innovations, run by Harper and his partner Shelley Houston.
After hours of experiments in their kitchen, the vegan leather is now in development at Scion, the crown research institute in Rotorua.
Harper says the market-viable product should be ready by November, but the couple is already in talks with major global brands including Adidas, BMW and Victoria Beckham.
He says the next step is to get funding to set up a pilot project.
'We are going to have to find some space in the Tauranga region where we can set up our first presses to get the moisture out of the kiwifruit, our first kilns to dry the kiwifruit to make the powder and our first compounding area where we can actually make our secret sauce.'
Harper says they expect to produce up to 10,000 square metres of KiwiLeather.
A wool couch decorated with woollen blankets, pillows and throws was the centre piece of the booth showcasing all things wool at Fieldays. Photo: Davina Zimmer
Another iconic New Zealand product, wool, is a special focus at this agriculture expo. After years in the doldrums, wool is starting to make a comeback, according to Angus Hansen, founder and operations manager of Wisewool.
'It has definitely turned a corner,' says Hansen, sitting on an all-wool and wood couch in the It's Wool booth, surrounded by other products made from the fibre by several companies.
'We [Wisewool] source wool from about 300 farms in the Tairāwhiti region, which is around three million kilos. We use a portion of that for Wisewool which is value added and we sell our products mainly into bedding and furniture – which we're sitting on now – globally.'
Hansen says the company is paying its farmer suppliers more than market rate.
'Farmers are making money off their wool again. So, yeah, wool has been in a tough spot for actually quite a long time and it finally feels like [with] the groundswell of us making changes [and] adding value, farmers are finally making money off their wool again.'
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