Repost — which turns treated timber waste from vineyards into low-cost fence posts — was born inadvertently when Greg and Dansy Coppell needed to address a fencing problem on their St Arnaud farm.
The couple bought the 500ha property about nine years ago and needed to fence it to help improve both stock management and pasture control — but the couple were on a tight budget which did not include brand-newfence posts.
Greg’s father Allan had used discarded vineyard posts for decades on his farms and so the couple found a stockpile of posts at a Marlborough vineyard and spent days picking over it and loading up a truck, returning to the farm to repurpose the broken posts.
Before they knew it, farming friends around the country were asking for a unit-load of posts and — nek minnit, as the saying goes — they had a fence-post business.
Greg and Dansy’s nomination said Repost was working at reducing the treated timber from vineyards and repurposing them into affordable fencing for farmers.
Their innovation in sustainability was helping save the environment and farmers’ budgets.
"They have a strong community mindset and are actively taking part in initiatives to help farmers."
The viticulture industry disposed of thousands of tonnes of durable wood into landfills each year and Repost was now changing one of the industry’s largest waste issues.
Since its launch, Repost has saved more than 6500 tonnes from landfill and fenced more than 6200km, including on the North Island’s East Coast in the aftermath of the devastating Cyclone Gabrielle in February last year.
Initially, the couple were told that Repost would not work on a commercial scale.
But, as Dansy said, there was nothing a farmer liked to be told more than that he could not do something.
Dansy particularly liked the number of repeat customers, as well as the word-of-mouth referrals.
There were also catchment groups and other rural neighbourhood groups that would order a unit load and there was a "feeling of community coming together to make it happen".
The couple’s aim was to keep the business low key but be a company that everyone could relate to — "doing something that helps everyone".
Greg, who still also has a building business, met Dansy at a Kiwi barbecue in London. She recalled him in his stubbies, cooking sausages.
She grew up on a lifestyle block in England and hated living in the city — "I’m a country girl by heart".
When she moved to New Zealand with Greg more than 10 years ago, she was working in earthquake recovery work in Christchurch and Greg was building, and they wanted to get back to rural living.
Quipping he was a hermit who liked being up a gully, Greg had a passion for farming albeit he had not had a great deal of time recently for that.
"The farm will be there, it’s going nowhere," he said.
And the concept of Repost was really nothing new in the farming world.
Rural communities had been living and breathing the circular economy for 150 years, he said.
