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The last residents of Kelso have long since quit the flood-ravaged Otago town but, as HUGH DE LACY discovers, the name lives on in its only remaining business.
Now the Lawlors and their son Hamish are making their livings out of the new Southland icon, the dairy cow – but they’re doing it from a base a little further north, in Kelso, Otago. In doing so they’re keeping alive the name of the village whose population reached 140 in the 1950s, but was subsequently abandoned after a succession of disastrous floods in the 1970s and 1980s. The Lawlors’ farm at Kelso but are also proprietors of the agricultural contracting business they call Kelso Kontracting (yes, with a ‘K’). And the irony is that, while the Lawlors are keeping the farm, Kelso Kontracting is upping stakes and shifting five kilometres down the road to the old Barrow Box sawmill, just north of Tapanui. For Athol Lawlor it’s been something of a round trip. He grew up on a sheepfarm at Waikaka, near Kelso, and got into contracting by working for a neighbour, Doug Potter, who had a hay-baling and silage business. In 1969, after a couple of years as an employee, Lawlor bought the boss out and set himself up as A.R. Lawlor Ltd, continuing until 1973 when he on-sold the business to Peter Mardon. Athol and Lorraine had been married just a couple of years at that stage and they had the opportunity to join Athol’s family partnership farming a 240 hectare block at Wendonside in northern Southland. They stayed there for five years, long enough to earn the deposit on a 120 hectare sheep and cattle farm at Dacre on State Highway 1, north of Invercargill. When the long farm recession of the 1980s hit, they answered the challenge to diversify by buying a vegetable washing operation, and growing and selling 500 tonnes a year of swedes to markets throughout the South Island. The endless stream of trucks passing their gate provided a ready-made distribution network, and the operation produced a good cashflow and return, even as interest rates topped 28 percent, and North Island dairy-farmers swept in to convert sheepfarms to dairying on 95 percent finance While the notion of selling swedes to South Islanders would seem a bit like flogging ice to Eskimos, it provided work for seven or eight staff and at the same time rekindled Athol Lawlor’s affection for farm machinery. In what was a major innovation for the time, he bought a sugar-beet harvester as the key to the operation, but it was still a lot of hard physical work in the chill of the Southland winters. They also reared about 100 bull calves a year on the waste from the silage operation. Then one day in 1992 someone walked in off the main road and offered to buy the farm. The Lawlors grabbed the opportunity, selling the market contacts and washing plant along with the farm. They then decided to enter semi-retirement by buying the present Kelso farm and raising calves on silage, for which Athol bought an old tow-behind chopper. The semi-retirement didn’t last long because neighbours kept asking them to make silage, and they quickly found themselves back in agricultural contracting with one of them, Willie Henderson. Between Lawlors’ chopper and a truck, and Henderson’s digger and a truck, Kelso Kontracting was born. Some of Lawlor’s original Kelso clients were among the first to call on the new business’s services because the going concern he’d sold to Peter Mardon in 1973 had not survived the downturn of the ‘80s. After a couple of years Willie Henderson decided to call it a day, and he sold his share of Kelso Kontracting to the Lawlors’ son Hamish. At the time his parents moved back to Kelso, Hamish was boarding at Menzies College in Wyndham, after which he went on to complete a fitting and turning apprenticeship with Colin Donald Engineering at Edendale. It was the right industry for a young man to get into at the right time, with the initial trickle turning to a flood of North Island dairy-farmers coming south to convert Southland’s relatively cheap and fertile land, with its reliable summer rain, to dairying. Since 1995 there have been more than 700 such conversions in Southland. During his apprenticeship Hamish Lawlor was involved in dozens of these conversions, building rotary platforms and doing yard work, along with general engineering work. Hamish completed his apprenticeship in 1997, and raced back to Kelso to join his father in Kelso Kontracting. Between them they enjoy a unique perspective on the dairy industry that is now the main focus of their business. Hamish has vast experience in converting sheepfarms to dairying, and Athol has 38 years’ experience in making silage for them. Hamish has been able to take the contracting company beyond seasonal silage-making and into the year-round work of building laneways, excavating dams and milking sheds, tiling, draining, roading and laying fence-lines. Father and son work well together, each in his own speciality, with both drawing on Kelso Kontracting’s pool of labour and machinery. The company employs 10 permanent staff, supplemented by four or five seasonal drivers for the rakes and mowers during the height of the silage season. The main silage machines are a John Deere chopper and a Fendt tractor with a triple mower, an Hitachi digger and JCB tractor for stacking, and four Mercedes trucks. The dairy conversion earthmoving gear includes three Hitachi diggers, a Komatsu grader with a laser-guided blade, an FAE mobile rock-crusher and the usual collection of trailers and bottom-dumpers. Two of the diggers are 20-tonners, and the third, of 13 tonnes, is fitted with both a grader blade and a post compactor – the latter mounted on the front where it has proved so efficient that one of the operators recently set a company record by driving 500 posts in six hours. Transport for both the silage and earthmoving gear is provided by a Mercedes tractor unit with an up-to-date transport trailer. The rationale behind shifting the company’s base from the Kelso farm to the old sawmill near Tapanui is the need for more buildings to house plant, and to provide space for Hamish to expand his engineering interests. The 12 hectare Tapanui site, which has several large buildings, is contaminated with preservative chemicals from the old milling operation, but work has begun on its rehabilitation. Athol Lawlor is a great believer in providing training opportunities for his staff under the umbrella of the industry training organisation InfraTrain. This year one apprentice has graduated as a qualified agricultural contractor, and two more are completing their unit standards. “Rural contracting is a skilled operation, and these young fellows need to be recognised as skilled operators. They’re not just drivers: they actually know what their doing and why they’re doing it. After all, you don’t go to an unqualified doctor, dentist or lawyer, so why should your contractor be just a Joe Bloggs-average with no skills?” he says. As well as helping write industry standards for InfraTrain, Athol Lawlor has been prominent in the Rural Contractors Association, always with the aim of bring ever-greater levels of professionalism into the industry. These days there’s virtually nothing left of the township of Kelso but the old and disused railways goods shed, and Kelso Kontracting’s shift to Tapanui has made even that last business link a tenuous one. But if there’s one thing the Lawlors have learned in nearly 40 years in rural business it’s that change is a constant, and that their challenge is to keep ahead of it.
Contractor Vol.32 No.1 February 2008 |
Athol and Lorraine Lawlor used to make their living in Southland out of that old local icon, the swede, but that was during the hard times of the 1980s when diversification was the catch-phrase.