Low-cost posts for farms and no landfill charges for vineyards

A start-up in Marlborough is busy repurposing damaged vineyard posts into sustainable posts for farm fencing.

Repost is the brainchild of Tasman sheep and beef farmer, Greg Coppell. 

He had "a hell of a lot of fencing" to do after buying the 500-hectare property in St Arnaud.

To keep costs down, he turned a pile of broken vineyard posts once used to hold up the canopy into a set of fence posts for the farm.

Recycling the timber was tedious work with hand tools though.

"I got sick of pulling out nails and grinding off nails. So I started building a machine to do it and it just sort of grew from there," he said. 

He teamed up with Blenheim viticulturist, Stuart Dudley, to do so. Without him, "there's just no way" it would have come together Coppell said.

After three and a half years the business has come a long way.

A crew of nine work at vineyards across the top of the the South Island using the machinery developed by Coppell and Dudley, which is fixed onto custom made trailers. 

There are also crews helping with the Cyclone Gabrielle recovery in Hawke's Bay.

Once the nails are pulled out, the posts are docked to 1.8 or 1.6-metre lengths and trucked to farms around the country for about half the price of new posts.

"They've all got homes before they've been processed because they're cheap. It comes down to dollars." 

The wineries pay Repost to process the broken or old posts, so they don't have to send them to landfill.

Pernod Ricard Winemakers is one of his vineyard clients, with a team working on a huge pile of broken posts at their Triplebank vineyard near Seddon.

"We've probably done about 10 or 15,000 in here at least," Coppell estimated, with another 20,000 posts still to be processed at the site. 

Tracey Marshall is Pernod Ricard's New Zealand sustainability manager. She said they had been stockpiling the posts, many damaged by  tractors and harvesters driving between the rows of vines, for a "very, very long time."

"Over any given year, you can see up to four percent breakage in some vineyards. And when you look at the size of the industry and Marlborough, that's a lot of posts. We're talking millions of posts out there." 

Repost is the 2023 recipient of Beef+Lamb New Zealand 's Gallagher Innovative Farming Award and the Wine Industry Award at the Cawthron Marlborough Environment Awards.