JUST over a year ago, the Australian Labor government announced its policy to phase-out live sheep exports, should it win the 2025 election.
That decision had a huge impact for Western Australian harvesting parts manufacturer and retailer, Harvestaire, according to its general manager Dirk Vorster.
"For three decades, lamb cradles were a large part of our business," Mr Vorster said.
"It's in the name of our business - we focus on the back end of the cycle, harvest time.
"We don't do anything for seeding yet, so manufacturing and selling lamb cradles marks the start of our year."
In a typical year, Harvestaire would sell about 350 lamb cradles and about 4000 leg pins as spare parts.
Unsurprisingly, those sales figures have since plummeted.
"Last year we only sold 240 lamb cradles, and this year, from memory, we've only sold a few hundred leg pins - that tells me farmers are not even getting their cradles out of the shed to go do marking," he said.
While it wrestled with questions as to how this gap could be closed, like any good business, the business pivoted.
Rather than making redundancies, Harvestaire opted to reshuffle its staff and identify export market opportunities.
It was that line of thinking that allowed Harvestaire to take advantage of opportunities to ramp up the exportation of its sieves to other countries, in particular the United States.
"So we typically have about five people working in our dispatch team, and this export contract has allowed us to move four of those people temporarily into our production team" Mr Vorster said.
"We don't want to lose good people, right?
"All of our people are good and it would be foolish of us as business managers if we did not keep this team intact.
"The live sheep exporting problem created by the Federal government was the catalyst for us to start exporting, because we had the capacity and team available.
"One thing we had to do was to find an additional market for our other products - that's where our sieves come in, and we've been working with Abilene Machine on that."
Mr Vorster said about two years ago, Abilene Machine asked Harvestaire for a quote on sieves, however, it was not cost-effective at that time.
"Australian manufacturing, albeit very good, is very expensive versus manufacturing in the rest of the world," he said.
"We do not have a low-cost base that we manufacture from - our products are incredibly good, you do get what you pay for.
"But in the American market, their farmers, as opposed to Australian farmers, would prefer to potentially pay less for a product as opposed to paying more for a quality product."
Recently however, Abilene Machine felt the time was right to put forth a superior product in the American market - due in part to a notable number of American farmers complaining about poor quality sieves imported from South America, according to Mr Vorster.
So on April 17, Harvestaire loaded up a container with steel-frame welded sieves and chaffers to be exported to Abilene Machine in Solomon, Kansas, USA, where they will then be sold across America, via their multiple retail outlet stores.
"It's close to 500 sieves we'll be exporting this year," Mr Vorster said.
He predicts the number of sieves Harvestaire will be exporting to the United States will triple in the next couple of years.
"If you think about it, the State of Iowa in the USA has got 10,000 headers," he said.
"What State in Australia has 10,000 headers?
"I think the last time I heard, we've got 10,000 headers in all of Australia."
The larger exporting opportunities are also unlocking benefits for Australian farmers.
"It's like any contract negotiation," he said.
"Say for example I purchase 500 widgets from my suppliers and they charge $10 per widget.
"But if I say I want 2000 widgets, they'll charge $8 for that same part.
"We have a long history of passing those savings onto our customers and in some instances our prices have gone down a little, but for the vast majority of them, they've stayed stable."
Mr Vorster said Harvestaire secured a robotic spot welder, which provides more consistent and quality spot welds on the sieve louvres.
The robotic spot welder was an investment of $200,000 on Harvestaire's part, and apart from the efficiency and productivity gains it uses substantially less amps than their previous welder.
However, Mr Vorster said despite the government calling for net zero by 2050, there was no assistance in transitioning agriculture manufacturers to that figure, something which he said remains an industry-wide frustration.
"If we were making solar panels, we would have received some government assistance," Mr Vorster said.
"But there is none, and I can only assume that's because this is ag, and I don't think the incumbents are really interested in supporting ag, no matter what they tell you."
Nevertheless, Harvestaire will continue to make investments into new technologies, with or without government assistance.
"I am very confident that if we invest in technology and people, we can become a major sieve and chaffer supplier into the USA," Mr Vorster said.
