Rodney ready to represent at Fieldays

Rodney will be represented at Fieldays, with Warkworth’s Stronghold Trading exhibiting its range of cattle yards and animal handling equipment at the event, which runs from June 11 to 14 at Mystery Creek, just outside Hamilton.

There is perhaps no bigger endorsement of Fieldays than a company returning multiple times and for Stronghold this will be its 14th appearance.

Stronghold founder Maarten Bubbert says Fieldays is great for brand awareness and exposure.

“People can see firsthand how everything works.

“We send out like 70,000 to 75,000 flyers, eight times a year nationwide, so exhibiting is just a good way to show people the product they would have seen in the flyer,” he says.

Stronghold will be displaying everything from head-bails, cattle crushes and hay feeders to farm gates, loading ramps and cattle yards.

“We are right in from gate one and will have a complete cattle yard set up and a couple of portable ones, plus a whole range of lunging arenas.

“We’ll have a new squeeze crush on display, which is type of a cattle crush where the sides come in to squeeze the animal, and some new gates – I think we’ve got the biggest range in New Zealand.”

“All our products are galvanised for New Zealand weather conditions, so they last. And we offer a 10-year warranty on all the galvanising and the welding.”

Bubbert says the Stronghold story started 15 years ago when he bought a lifestyle block in Matakana and needed to replace about 30 gates.

“I ordered 100 gates from China, put them on Trade Me and I sold everything in a week. Including the 30 that I needed. So I thought I might as well just order a container, which is 400 gates. And I sold those in a month.

“So we started off as being a supplier for lifestyle blocks because there was nothing available in terms of affordable farming equipment. Now we do farm gates all the way up to high-end cattle yards.”

From its modest beginnings in Matakana, Stronghold now sells nationwide and supplies farming merchants such as PGG Wrightson, Farm Source, Farmlands and Ruralco.

The company has three yards across New Zealand including a small yard in Warkworth where the head office is also based, the main yard in Tirau in the central North Island, which is 10,000m2, and a yard in Ohoka near Christchurch.

So how important is Fieldays for your business these days?

“You’ve got to be there,” he says.

The same goes for visitors too.