OUR STORY

From farmer to engineer ...

Peter grew up on his parents’ dairy farm at Maihiihi (14kms north-east from Otorohanga), where he farmed fulltime after leaving school. In his early-20s he joined with his brother to buy their own dairy farm in the district. Peter then began work for a local engineering company that built rotary dairies and started constructing rotary dairies on his own account in 1993.

The original farm workshop has been extended twice, the fence boundary moved out three times and the pre-cast gantry installed in 2000. The company initially employed Peter, Diane (part-time) and two young workers and today has a staff of up to 25 fulltime employees.

Manufacturing facilities have been extended to include a concrete slab tilt-table for easier handling in the pre-cast area, sectional rollers for bending steel, a large workshop with dedicated machining and welding areas and an office centre.

The achievements, the challenges ...

Dairy Tech's biggest dairy project to date is an 80-bail external rotary that was built near Taupo in 2003, however most of the company’s rotary projects average 50 bails and "no job is too small".

The biggest non-dairy project so far is a bulk fertiliser store completed for Freight Lines Ltd in early 2003 in Progress Drive, Otorohanga, where Dairy Tech has since designed and built many of the steel curved-truss buildings in that new industrial area.

Dairy Tech has proven it can meet challenging project requirements, such as building an under-platform gallery in a rotary dairy near Te Poi (south of Matamata) that had a natural spring flooding the excavation – the solution being to continuously pump out the rising water while a concrete base was poured.

Looking ahead, Dairy Tech is focused on design and construction advances for new dairies, upgrades, platforms, yards and components that can further reduce milking times and offer gains in operational efficiencies and cow flow.

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