LEGENDS
Words by Debbie Harrison
Respected logging and forestry fella K
EN HOLMES IS A FAMILIAR NAME TO MANY IN THE forestry industry for his work as a harvesting contractor. However, in the past decade he’s also gained a wellrespected reputation for the trucking business he’s created. Ken’s trucking endeavours started with one logging truck and grew to 120 trucks at one stage, servicing forestry customers in the central North Island and Northland. Today, Holmes Group has a head office in Whangarei and a fleet of 50 trucks operating around Northland. “I bought my first truck off Noel Galloway from Murupara back in the `nineties, when we were still logging in Kaingaroa,” says Holmes. “It was a Mack off-highway double, and we had it working out of Murupara dispatch for Fletchers. It felt like quite a big deal at the time, investing in something that wasn’t logging gear. Not long after that I bought a Western Star stem truck off Stan Williamson – it was working in Tarawera Forest for Fletchers which is where I started my logging career, so it felt a bit full circle. I bought the first truck to shift wood and the second to create some scale.” In 1998, Ken and Holmes Logging moved north to take up a key supplier harvesting role for Carter Holt Harvey, working in Woodhill and Riverhead forests. “It was a big move, leaving the Bay of Plenty where I’d grown up and worked pretty much all my life. We took our Rotorua crew
60 | Truck & Driver
- Ken Holmes with us and set them up in a house, but the two trucks remained based in Murupara. They were both big off highway trucks so they couldn’t really go anywhere else,” Holmes says. The scale of the key supplier contract meant Ken needed to focus on the harvesting side of his business for the next few years. “We went from one logging crew to eight crews, so all our capital and focus was on expanding the harvesting side of the business at that stage. The expansion included the purchase of two swing yarders and creating a super skid in Riverhead Forest. We purchased two highway trucks, a W924 and T600 Kenworth’s fitted with old-school drop bolsters – these carted off-highway from the haulers to the super skid. “Our first new Kenworth was a tri drive 904 to replace the Western Star in Kaingaroa. The tri drive Western Star was taken north to work on the Riverhead stems job.” The next expansion of the Holmes Transport fleet happened when Ken’s key supplier contract with Carter Holt Harvey ended. His next move was to buy stumpage and manage sales, a strategy which included the purchase of a 140,000-tonne forest in Ahuroa, north of Auckland, in 2003. “We cut back to just two swing-yarder hauler crews and two mechanised ground-based crews and harvested and carted close to a million tonnes of privately owned stumpage and forest over the four years.
