Oakdale Organics is New Zealand’s largest supplier of certified organic seedlings. When we started one of our core principals was that we would never mechanise and automate our production at the expense of local employment.
One of the most labour intensive parts of growing organic seedlings is the filling of trays and recycling of pots and punnets. Altus have proved to be excellent partner in doing this work.
Seeding production is very dependent on a number of factors including weather, time of the year and customer demand. Altus has the labour resource to meet our fluctuating demands enabling us to rapidly scale up or down, while removing the headache of organising temps.
The key way in which Altus have helped is by providing the resource and infrastructure to do the tray filling and recycling. Another interesting aspect of the relationship is that once we had started to work with Altus we discovered that there was lot more work that they could do for us – allowing us to focus on what our core business is – to develop strong and healthy vegetable and herb seedlings. Altus also decanted and filled bottles with organic neem oil which we then sold through our distribution network.
Altus has enabled us to focus on “value add”, innovation and the sales and marketing aspects of the business i.e. the areas that are going to make the biggest difference to our success.
Stephen Plank, March 2012
