AN innovative Riverland family business is back to making the jobs of graziers across Australia safer and simpler, after being heavily impacted by Covid-19 border closures.

Rod Holland (pictured), of Cooltong, has spent more than a decade manufacturing stocklifts with his son, Bob, but saw sales grind to a halt when he was barred from entering New South Wales and Victoria during the height of Covid-19.

“NSW and Victoria wouldn’t let me through their states, and South Australia wouldn’t let me back in if I went through there,” he said. 

“Instead they sent me through the Strzelecki Track into Queensland, and that was shocking.

“There were no other trucks doing it, but they did it to me and I couldn’t work out why.”

Mr Holland said the restrictions had limited his ability to complete deliveries to some of his biggest markets.

“We had 14 machines sitting here all for delivery, and that nearly buggered us because nobody had paid for them,” he said.

“It put a strain on the finances, but we got through it.

“Eventually, a (police) sergeant in Adelaide saw all our applications and said he would put a stop to it, and he did.

“I just had to do heaps of runs (to the eastern states) until I got through (the backlog).”

Mr Holland said he had been developing the idea for his patented stocklift, which allows farmers to safely handle large numbers of sheep, goats, calves and more, for about 20 years before finding a design that worked.

“I was an earthmoving contractor in the Central Darling Shire (in NSW), and you get to know all the graziers and you become a free hand then,” he said.

“When you go into yards and you’re faced with thousands of sheep or lambs and you run around in the pen, and you finish the day with a blood nose and a shirt sleeve missing.

I’d say to them this was a silly idea and they’d tell me to come up with something better… and I did.”

Mr Holland said he finally devised the basis of his design while sitting in his grader in country NSW.

“I was watching this grazier pushing sheep past a grid trying to get them to go through a gate and the sheep fell in and they couldn’t go anywhere – they lost their legs,” he said.

“That got me thinking straight away about how to take their legs away, and that’s where the base of my machine came from.

“It hit me in bed one night and I sat bolt upright and thought ‘I’ve got it’.

“Hydraulics and solar have started to move into a lot of systems, and that got me thinking more about using the technology that’s out now…

“The hydraulics and the solar are the key to the success of our machine.”

Mr Holland said the stocklifts sold “very slowly” at the beginning, but now almost “all the graziers along the Darling have machines”.

“When I did the first ones, I sold them to a goat farmer and he bought three straight up,” he said.

People who saw the machine in his place were the ones that wanted one and it grew from there, but it was still very slow. 

“It’s hard to explain why it was so slow – it was something totally different, with no generators running and things like that. 

“Once a few graziers started to use them it just exploded. 

“We couldn’t make them fast enough, just me and my son, so then we had to start employing people. We have five people building machines now. 

Mr Holland said the business currently had over 40 orders, with more coming every day.

“If a neighbour sees it they ring up and order them,” he said. 

“Cattle farmers are swinging from cattle to goats and some of them have ordered eight machines – how can you keep up with that? 

“It’s good for us, but to try to keep up with it is pretty hard.”

The popularity of the machine was mainly due to how it improved safety for the graziers, Mr Holland said.

“If you try to get near a goat’s head, it’s so dangerous because they’re aggressive and so are dorper sheep,” he said.

“This just takes all the risk out of it. 

It’s also easier on the animal because they’re not fighting you and they’re not jumping around all over the place.”

Mr Holland said he hoped to develop a version of the stocklift for cattle farmers and wind back his involvement with the making of the machines.

“I still go seven days a week even with a broken back,” he said.

“I need to be in the boat that’s sitting in the shed.”