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Story Dave McLeod & Wayne Munro PhotosGerald Shacklock & Helena Williamson

Williamson Contracting’s 2019 Mercedes-Benz Arocs blower truck delivers stock feed to a farm on the Poutu Peninsula, south of Dargaville. Driver Dan Merritt is controlling things

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Spreading Northland’s newest (and biggest) spreader, a 2020 Merc Arocs 6x6, goes about its work

NOT YET TURNED 48, JASON WILLIAMSON IS already an old hand in the bulk fertiliser groundspreading business.

Remarkably, the Dargaville-based Williamson bought his first truck at just 18 – fully three decades ago!

Now he and wife Helena own not just one, but two trucking operations – the Spreading Northland business, with its ninth truck due to go to work soon…

And a modest contracting company with four bulk truck and trailer units that support both the fert spreading and the two diggers that the company also owns.

It’d be nice to say that it’s been all plain sailing in the

Williamsons’ 30 years in business….but, to put it bluntly, it hasn’t.

Like many in New Zealand’s rural trucking industry, Jason’s story has been a mix of modest, steady growth – on the back of lots of hard graft – and an ability to adapt to changing circumstances, make the most of opportunities…

And survival over setbacks, ranging from dud gear, rural downturns….even an horrific accident.

Jason grew up on the family farm at Arapohue, about 11 kilometres south of Dargaville, on State Highway 12.

He left school at 15, starting work in Dargaville as a panelbeating apprentice. But then, after two years, moved to

Kaiwaka for work – 66 kilometres away from home: “I got a bit over the travelling. So I said to the old man one night: ‘I’m sick of this.’ ”

His father, Phil – who’d been involved in contracting as well as dairy farming –suggested that Jason buy a bulk groundspreader.

He duly did exactly that. And thus, with the startup of Williamson Spreaders, he became a teenage transport operator – working in closely with longtime friend Michael Douglas (who had a truck and trailer and a digger).

To say Jason’s secondhand, Northland-built Tructor purchase wasn’t the flashest or best groundspreader around would be a serious understatement: What it was, was affordable – just $15,000.

It was, says Jason, “a built-up thing…..built out of anything that was lying around.”

It wasn’t, he adds, “very good.” It had a home-made, oneman cab on it – solid steel, with a front window…but no window in the door. And not much in the way of brakes!

It was more tractor than truck: “You didn’t cart with them on the road – we just went from job to job as it was classed like a tractor. It even had tractor tyres on it.

“They were heaps of shit: I spent more time fixing it than driving. And you’d get two or three flat tyres a day ‘cos they couldn’t handle the weight. And that was just before cellphones – so life wasn’t easy. So I learnt quite a bit about fixing stuff.”

On the other hand, he found good support from local farmers – and the business took off, with his mate Michael carting fert to the spreader.

The reality that he needed good brakes was graphically brought home early on when he had a lucky escape: “I was doing one of the neighbours’ places and stalled it…ended up flying backwards down a hill and into a dam!”

Clockwise, from above: Jason paces the yard, past two-thirds of his groundspreader fleet – parked up, thanks to bad weather.... In 30 years Jason Williamson Contracting has become part of the recent history of the Northern Wairoa district. St Peters Church Anglican Church at Te Kopuru is much more historic again – built 119 years ago!..... The unloved Tructor spreader was Jason’s first truck, which he bought when he was just 18

Financially though he didn’t see he had much choice but to persist with it: “I used that truck for two or three years and just got absolutely sick of it in the end. Sick of using it, sick of spending money on the truck….and fixing it.”

So, in 1994, a frustrated and fed-up Jason went and bought himself a Mercedes-Benz 1222 4x4 spreader: “We bought a brand-new cab and chassis and I put a secondhand bin on it.” By then it was clear, he says ruefully, that this is what he should have done from the start.

“When we bought that truck it meant that we could cart out of the stores direct to the farms. That made life a whole lot easier. I just had to pay for it, that was the hardest thing!”

Fortunately, there was plenty of work around Jason’s home area – enough to warrant buying an Automat self-unloading trailer after a couple of years. Then, says Jason, “we just kept plodding along like that for a few years – just doing the local stuff.”

Downtime forced by wet winter weather prompted him to head off one year to Aussie, getting work in a goldmine in Leonora, Western Australia.

Around 1999, the business added a secondhand Merc Unimog 4x4 spreader – and “a young fella, Andrew Perreau joined me. He was my first employee.”

Adds Jason: “In true Unimog style, it fell over a couple of times, and needed fixing.”

Around the same time as the spreading business expanded, “the old man bought a kumara farm near Dargaville and we (Williamson Spreaders) shifted from Arapohue to there, using it as our depot. It made life easier being closer to town, ‘cos Ravensdown is here. And Ballance.”

And more change: Around a year later, Jason’s brother Craig joined the business and they changed the company name to Williamson Spreaders & Cartage.

“We built the business up quite a bit. So in the early 2000s we bought our first tipper – an old 328 Mitsi and we used the Automat trailer out the back.

“We used it to cart product to the spreaders…. Until then we were giving that work away to other people.”

The family also began operating a limestone quarry on the dairy farm, and the bulk truck carted limestone out of there. A new three-axle bulk trailer was also ordered to go behind the Mitsi.

Mike Shelford, Darrel Bradley and Colin Barwell were added to the driver lineup – in part because Jason had bought another secondhand Merc 1222 spreader: “It had been rolled over, but they put another cab on it and we finished it off. We used that for a couple of years.”

Between 2003 and 2010 “plenty happened” and the workload continued to grow – prompting Williamson Spreaders & Cartage to form relationships with other local spreaders to help meet demand.

Says Jason: “We worked in a bit with Les Sweeney, a groundspread operator from around here – then eventually we bought Les out. They had two Hino spreaders and two Automat trailers. We sold one of the Hinos straight away and bought a brand-new Merc 1528 Atego – and then bought a second road truck: A FUSO FV 430 and trailer. That was 2003.”

Driver Colin Johnston (who still works for Jason) came over from Sweeney’s operation.

And still new work kept coming in – so in 2004 a secondhand Mercedes-Benz Atego 1828 spreader was bought, its arrival coinciding with the departure of Craig Williamson to manage the family’s dairy farm….and with Jason’s younger brother Blair starting work in the business.

It was time. Jason reckoned, for more diversification: “We bought a digger from a local operator we dealt with. The digging work was something we could do in the winter, because back then we didn’t do any spreading during winter.

“So it created a bit of income. Plus we do our own maintenance over winter – we keep quite busy doing that.” And the spreader drivers “jump into the road truck when needed.”

Diggers were an obvious addition to the company’s business, seeing as Jason had been operating them “since I was about 12 – ‘cos the old man always had one.”

Still, it was brother Blair who initially took on most of the digger work – the machine running in tandem with one bulk truck and trailer unit.

The bulk cartage side of the operation built slowly – the groundspreading, more dramatically: Not long after Jason had been talking with local Duncan Wilson about buying his spreading business, the longtime Dargaville operator was killed in an accident.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Jason bought the business off the family – the deal resulting in the addition of one driver and two bulk spreaders to the Williamson operation.

When Jason says that nothing has been straightforward about the evolution of the business, he means it: Brother Blair “left to do his OE – so I started driving the digger, as well as running the business,” he explains.

And that was just the start of it: “We got rid of the Unimog and got a Mitsi Fighter 4x4. We had a couple of drivers leave and buy their own trucks.

“Then I had my accident.” It sounds ominous….and it was – very, very bad. It happened not out on some treacherous hillside during a spreading operation….but in the yard!

On a Friday afternoon in October 2008, Jason was washing the bin and spinner on the smallest spreader, the Mitsubishi Fighter, with the spinner operating: “I slipped and it grabbed my foot and dragged me into the bin by my foot!

“It degloved my leg (and yes, that is as horrific as it sounds) and they had to cut me out of it. I ended up in Middlemore Hospital Burns Unit for just over two months as plastic surgeon Murray Beagley reconstructed my leg. I was just lucky that the right surgeon was there at the right time.”

Extensive plastic surgery, involving skin and muscle grafts, have seen him eventually return to near-normal walking – but he’s been told his leg will never fully recover.

He doesn’t dwell on it now – just laughs wryly as he says: “So that put a spanner in the works for about a year or so! But the guys were great and kept the business going over that time.”

Actually, on reflection, he reckons that he was actually only off work for about three months: “I just had to come back to work. I bought a second digger to catch up on the work.”

Above: Jason and Helena married 20 years ago, have worked together in the businesses since 2002 Right: The Mercedes-Benz Arocs 3348 6x6 bought last year is easily able to haul its own Automat trailer to jobs

And another thing: There was a need to separate the groundspreading and bulk cartage/contracting sides of the business into separate entities – prompted by Jason and wife Helena entering into a joint-venture agreement with fertiliser cooperative Ravensdown to co-own the spreader operation.

The fert giant had approached Jason with the JV idea before his accident and it made sense, as he relates now: “It was something they were doing throughout the country with different operators and they wanted to set one up in Northland here. So about five months after the accident we started talking again and that’s when we did the JV.

“We did the JV because they were looking around for people: Someone was going to do it in Northland – so we thought it might as well be us.”

Thus in 2010 the business was divided, with the bulk tippers and contracting business renamed Williamson Contracting, fullyowned by Jason and Helena….

While the newly-created Spreading Northland was set up with Ravensdown and Williamson Contracting each holding a 50% share. The spreading business has four directors – two Ravensdown execs, plus Jason and Helena.

In terms of the day to day running of the spreading business, nothing changed, Jason says – but the JV has brought benefits for both parties: “We just run it how we want to. But it meant a bit more support and security following my accident – and the technology side was evolving quite a bit as they had developed their own technology for the spreading computers in the trucks and the guidance systems.”

Ravensdown’s computerised GPS-based spreading technology – which has evolved over the years into the current HawkEye system, is capable of setting and controlling various application rates. Spreadmark certification guarantees that fertilisers will be placed exactly “where they can be of the most agricultural benefit and the least risk of environmental harm.” The HawkEye

technology includes proof of placement maps.

For Ravensdown, as Jason says, the partnership guarantees that there’s always someone on hand, ready to apply its fertiliser. Happily, the deal allows for Spreading Northland to still do work involving other fert companies: “We’re not restricted to just doing Ravensdown. We spread from anywhere – they don’t worry about that either.”

The two Dargaville-based businesses – Spreading Northland and Williamson Contracting – have, happily, had a much less tumultuous period of calm and steady development since the spreading JV began.

That’s included buying out Ruawai Groundspread about three years ago: “It was always a good business and in a good area – very flat. And I’d known Karl Wrathall for years. He’d been offered a job running Ruawai Transport so wanted to sell the spreaders.”

Jason was keen to buy it – and there was no resistance to the purchase from the Ravensdown directors: “We just had to put a

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Opposite page: A flashback in time, with Williamson Contracting building a farm feed pad, with the help of a borrowed bulldozer and the digger from the family limestone quarry Above: Eight-year-old Scania P360 4x4 heads back to town from a coastal farm at Baylys Beach

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business plan together, and as long as the figures stacked up, everyone was fine.”

The last decade and a bit has seen steady progress in updating the gear used by both the groundspreading and bulk cartage operations.

Williamson Contracting now runs three bulk tipper truck and trailer units, and focuses on the cartage of palm kernel, fertiliser, limestone from their quarry and metal, as well as supporting the contracting machinery in doing earthworks for dams and ponds. The company also owns a blower truck and trailer for delivering palm kernel and other products into silos.

“We’ve got two Mercedes 2651 Arocs – one set up as a blower unit for filling silos – a 2014 Mitsubishi HD470 and an older Isuzu EX450 that’s our backup blower truck. We’ve also got two four-axle trailers, one three-axle trailer and two Hitachi ZX130 diggers.”

Clockwise from opposite page, top: The Merc Arocs 6x6 looked ridiculously tall when it arrived, but is proving to be a valuable addition to the fleet... Engineer Brett Ellis has been with the company for seven or eight years....Helena runs all of the admin side of the business.....The Arocs picks up another load of fert at the Ravensdown Greenleaf Lime works at Arapohue, near Dargaville..... FUSO Fighter 4x4 is referred to as “the mini-spreader”

Spreading Northland’s fleet is bigger – running to eight trucks (which soon will be nine), plus three Automat trailers and three side-tipper trailers.

Jason runs through the list: “One 2002 Scania P340 4x4s and one Scania P360 4x4. One Mercedes Atego 1529 4x4, one Mercedes Axor 1833 4x4 and one Mercedes Arocs 3348 6x6.”

Plus there’s a Mitsubishi FUSO 4x4 mini spreader (which the company converted from a 4x2): “And last month we bought out KD Spreaders and ended up with two more Mercedes Axor 1833 4x4s. Oh, and we’ve just got a brand-new Scania 410 XT waiting in the shed to get (a bin) built.”

Working out of Ravensdown’s Dargaville fert store, Spreading Northland covers most of Northland – as far north as Kaikohe, across to Whangarei to the east and as far south as Wellsford.

Things seem to be going okay right now – but Jason’s mindful of the challenges and likely setbacks in both businesses: “It’s the fluctuations in farming. You have your good and bad years, droughts, wet winters….and the payout.

“It affects us bigtime what happens with farmers: If they’ve got money they’ll spend it and we’ll be busy. If they don’t, then we won’t. That’s the hardest thing – managing your cashflow around the farmers’ cashflow.”

And he expects that environmental pressures are going to increase – adding extra challenges.

“And compliance is getting harder and harder. Around four years ago they closed our local testing station down for CoFs – so now we have to go to Whangarei. It all adds extra downtime.”

For the past seven or eight years, Jason has employed a fulltime engineer, Brett Ellis, in the company’s workshop: “All our spreader gear we build inhouse – and we’ve even built them for other companies.

“He’s a certified welder, but you’ve got to have an engineer to sign the work off and they won’t come here….they won’t even answer their phone. There’s just a lack of certifying engineers.”

Finding and keeping staff is often on the list of rural transport company challenges, but Jason says that they’ve been fortunate in that area: “Getting the right staff is difficult, but it is getting a bit better.

“I’ve got four staff on the contracting side and seven on

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Clockwise from top left: In 1999, Jason added a secondhand Unimog 4x4 to the new Merc 1222 he’d bought five years earlier. He also hired his first driver, Andrew Perreau – pictured here (on the left) with Jason..... Jason and Helena’s sons – Max, 17, and 12-year-old Ryan – have both taken an interest in the trucks and diggers, but Max will soon be off to Otago Uni to study politics, philosophy and economics..... 1997 Mitsi Shogun was added to the two spreaders and digger around 2003

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Clockwise from top left: Spreading Northland is a 50/50 JV between Williamson Contracting and Ravensdown.... The Williamson tippers specialise in carting stock feed, fert, limestone and other bulk loads.... The company’s workshop builds and refurbishes spreader bins for the operation..... Jason’s first tipper was this ‘85 Mitsubishi FV415, bought in the early 2000s.....New Merc 1222 cab and chassis (which Jason fitted the bin on) joined the Tructor, now boasting a replacement Ford cab, in 1994

the spreading side. We’ve also had a couple of drivers (Mike and Colin) who have been with the company for more than 13 and 15 years respectively.”

They are, says Jason, part of “a great team – who we really appreciate.”

However, the person who’s been by his side in both his personal and business life – working with him through all the challenges – is Helena. Their relationship extends back to “knowing each other in school.” They got married in 2001, following her return from an OE, and two years later had their first child.

Helena joined the business fulltime in 2002 – and, coming from working in banking, immediately slotted into running the financial and administration side of the operation.

She became a director in the business in 2004 and Jason says she’s probably had a fulltime job keeping him in line. But, while married couples working together for a couple of decades will inevitably experience “some issues,” Jason reckons that together he and Helena have forged a system that’s worked well.

He reckons with a laugh: “She leaves me to it really – and tells me off when it’s not right…..which is often.”

Despite many trials and tribulations, the Williamsons’ businesses have grown nicely – Jason putting that down to keeping it simple: “It’s just the opportunities that have arisen, buying out other businesses….and looking after our clients: I focus on them more than anything else really.” That’s as it should be, he adds, “when you’ve got such good, loyal clients.”

So where to from here, for the spreading business?

Jason: “I think there will end up only being a couple of big spreading companies in the whole of Northland – it’s just the way that things are going. A lot of the older operators want to get out and there’s not many younger operators starting up. It’s so expensive to get trucks on the road – and knowing what I know, if I was younger now I wouldn’t start doing it.”

The business does have its challenges: Regulatory requirements are becoming increasingly tougher by the year – plus “the trucks are more productive and there’s less fert going on than there ever used to be.”

Come what may, after the challenges that the Williamsons have already experienced – and survived – you’d have to think that they’re going to continue to take it all in their stride. T&D