Ricky Taylor
Canterbury, New Zealand
This story reflects one farmer’s own experience with their Tow and Fert. Every farm is different, so please treat it as a story rather than a forecast for your place.
Bringing liquid fertiliser to Canterbury contracting.
Ricky Taylor and his wife Rebecca decided to get into contracting fertiliser application in the liquid space. They could see change coming and wanted to be part of it, so they set up Fert Solutions.
Ricky and Rebecca own 50 hectares of semi-arable land in mid-Canterbury and run a grazing operation alongside the contracting business. When they went looking for a machine for Fert Solutions, they knew exactly what they needed: “we wanted a machine that could dilute or dissolve products properly and handle solid fine particle fertilisers by holding them in suspension.”
Liquid nitrogen is available in Canterbury now, but it’s dissolved offsite and trucked out to individual farms for application through a traditional boom sprayer. Ricky says that adds cost, all the extra handling and transport before it even reaches the paddock.
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We eventually found the Tow and Fert system and immediately could see the benefits. Farmers can cart in their dry product, dilute it down and away we go.
Clients of Fert Solutions pay the same rates for their dry product. They just dilute and apply it themselves through the Tow and Fert, instead of buying in liquid nitrogen that’s already been dissolved somewhere else.
Getting the first client on board
Ricky had been talking with Rhys from Align Farms about a possible partnership while he was still looking for the right machine. Once the contract was signed, Ricky moved forward with the Tow and Fert and took on Align Farms as his foundation client, running everything through the season using the system.
Align’s own account of how that went is on their story.
Changing minds
Growth and change have been constants for Ricky and Rebecca. Uptake for Fert Solutions has been steady, but the biggest hurdle has been mindset. “Changing people’s mindsets has been the hardest thing,” Ricky says. Granular fertiliser was the only option for decades, and that’s a hard habit to shake.
He’s starting to see it shift, though. “Farmers are getting there now as younger farmers come through and they know they have to change. The new freshwater policy has meant that many farmers are keen to give the Tow and Fert foliar system a crack.”
