42 | RURAL SERVICES » Hey Harvesting and Contracting First-hand experience in the dairy sector Hey Harvesting is based on Andy and Rebecca Hey’s 100ha, 200 cow dairy farm. Kelly Deeks Providing Central Taranaki farmers with a multitude of on-farm services, Stratford’s Hey Harvesting has many years of first-hand experience of the dairy sector to help its customers navigate their way through good times and bad. Hey Harvesting is based on Andy and Rebecca Hey’s 100ha, 200 cow dairy farm where Andy grew up with a determination to succeed in business and in farming. He entered the dairy industry as a sharemilker and built up the equity to buy the family farm before starting Hey Harvesting in 2004. “As a dairy farmer myself, I have high expectations around quality and pace of work, so at Hey Harvesting, we try to be as productive as possible,” he says. Starting out 20 years ago with two John Deere machines and no customers, Hey Harvesting was built by word of mouth and its growing reputation for high quality services. Today these include small-seed planting, maize and cereal crop harvesting, and silage and haybaling for a customer base of more than 95% dairy farmers. In addition, the business runs a quarry which supplies metal for housing development, forestry roads, and farm raceway construction. “Being on time and having good communication are also essential factors to success in this industry,” Andy says. “Once we’ve had a client for a couple of seasons we know what they expect, so with our new clients we work hard to understand their farms and their systems, and how involved with us they want to be.” Hey Harvesting still welcomes a number of new clients every season. Andy’s son Kobie has been a key part of Hey Harvesting for the past four years. Involved since he was a small child, Kobie has a passion for machinery, technology, and making sure the job is done to a high standard. Andy says the current recession is worse than any downturn he has seen in the past 20 years, with the added pressure of rising costs across the board. “Everything you buy is more expensive, and high interest rates are coming out of everyone’s bank account whether you are spending or not. We are all paying our staff more to keep up with the cost of living, and these cost structures make it difficult to even maintain an operational business. With our years of experience and our knowledge of the industry and the area, we make it work as best we can.” Hay Harvesting has kept busy over winter providing supplement for dairy cockies, hard fill for roading projects, and also completed a water tank installation for a local school on a pilot scheme. Weather was fair in Central Taranaki during most of winter with a useful cycle of a couple of days of rain followed by a week of sunshine. Then some pretty good snowfall near the end of August was followed by two weeks of more rain than sun. Still Hey Harvesting looked forward to the season picking up in spring as grass continued to grow and was going to need harvesting, and soil temperatures started to warm up and crops needed planting. SERVICES INCLUDING: • Drainage • SiteWork • Culverts &Underpasses • E uent Ponds • Races • 3DGPS Earthmoving • RockWork • StreamBank Protection • Forestry Roading • Farm/Forestry Bridges • Metal Cartage 027 727 7163 baylys@hotmail.co.nz We’re proud to be the accountants and business advisors to the Hey Harvesting team who always get the job done! Great relationships
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