‘Pat on the back' for repurposed posts

Otago Daily Times

29-04-2025

Marlborough's Repost is shaving costly time turning old treated vineyard posts into good-as-new farming posts with their own machinery.
Owners Greg and Dansy Coppell recycle broken posts, saving thousands of tonnes of timber from landfills.
Over the five years since they started the business they have streamlined this process, in between running a 500-hectare sheep and beef farm near St Arnaud.
The couple won the Agri-Innovations Awards with their portable hydraulic nail puller at the South Island Agricultural Field Days at Canterbury's Kirwee.
Broken pine posts treated with a mixture of copper, chromium and arsenic (CCA) to prevent fungal rot and insect damage are costly to dump and unable to be burned.
Mr Coppell said his wife entered their innovation in the awards and they were happy to get a "pat on the back" from the panel of three judges placing them ahead of 17 entries.
He said they were up against many tech companies and it was good to see a simple solution being recognised.
Their first machine to remove nails was built from an old silage wagon and bale feeder hooked up to a tractor.
"Now we have a really sleek, efficient machine that costs very little to run and produces a post about every 14 seconds. It's completely mobile and we go to the source and that just takes a heap of logistics and cost out of double-handling stuff."
Mr Coppell said the time-consuming part of re-purposing posts was removing nails, plastic clips, tek screws and staples.
The mechanised operation has taken a lot of the work out of this laborious task which used to be done by hammers, grinders and crowbars.
"You lose enthusiasm pretty quickly because time is money and especially when you have another 30 kilometres to go pulling these nails out so we streamlined the system. Farmers have known about this for a long time, but it's just time is the enemy."
A hydraulic cramp with two jaws has a pushing and grabbing mechanism which bites and holds nails with two rams pushing posts away.
Alongside the nail puller are drop saws designed to operate hydraulically after burning out commercial models, while a pointer puts new points on posts next to the mobile system.
Mr Coppell said he and his father pushed around a few ideas before settling on a hydraulic design to remove as much manual labour as possible.
A multi-ripsaw they also built turns half rounds into fence battens or droppers for lifestyle block owners and walkway decking.
In their next venture the Coppells are looking at machinery to extract deeper nails from construction framing and other timber and transforming pallets into wood shavings for livestock.
They first need to solve a supply issue as vineyards are in a downturn and there is a waiting list from sheep, beef and dairy farmers for their posts.
Part of a pivot will be supplying new trellis posts in a partnership with a Marlborough company and offering a trade-in scheme for old CCA posts they can on-sell.
Mr Coppell was brought up on a high country station at the back of Ward and his father was putting in old vineyard fence posts when viticulture was in its infancy in Marlborough.
He became a builder for 20 years, eventually buying their St Arnaud farm to find they would need to put in about 30 kilometres of fencing.
The alternative to costly new posts was recycling vineyard posts, free at the time.
He would spend a day loading a truck by hand and then had to pull the nails out, cut them off or leave them in.
"I realised after poking around the vineyards doing this how big a volume it all was. You pick up 1000-odd posts and there's another 90,000 there so I pitched the idea to some of the vineyards."
Initially, he put this in the too hard basket after doing the numbers until realising he needed to charge vineyards a fee for their removal which was much less than landfill costs.
Mr Coppell said the re-purposed posts gave farmers another option and kept new round wood operators honest.
"This is one thing in my life that has got bigger picture purpose than anything else. Marlborough's landfills have probably only got half the lifespan what they plan to and are making changes there to say we are not going to accept this waste.
"That's where we hopefully come in to get the product to farmers at a good price to get them productive as well."
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