Based in Kaiapoi in Canterbury, Southern Cypresses was established in 1997 and is owned by Patrick and Lynne Milne. This family-owned business is a wonderful example of how growth and success is directly attributed to a willingness to embrace nursery automation and be lifelong learners.
Patrick explains how nursery automation plays a pivotal role at Southern Cypresses, and we look at how everything has been strategically phased in over a period of 12 years.
Humble beginnings.
Patrick is a registered forest consultant and worked for the NZ Forest Service for 30 years before he decided it was time for a change. He’d always been interested in growing things, so thought he’d establish a bare-root nursery.
The Milne’s purchased some land and Southern Cypresses was born, with a focus on second-tier forestry species, Cypresses and Redwoods. For the next eight years, they grew upwards of 75,000 open ground plants per annum.
Around 2008, Patrick joined the New Zealand Forest Nursery Growers Association (NZFNGA) and attended an AGM in Australia, he adds, “while at the AGM, we visited a containerised nursery north of Brisbane – I thought it was pretty clever, so I returned home with the drive to do something similar. And so began the next stage of our vision.”
Scaling up.
Converting to containerised planting was a complete sea change from a bare-root system and it’s hats off to the Milne’s for their radical change of approach after nearly a decade of tried and true growing.
The husband-wife duo continued to build their business, taking it from one modest tunnel house to multiple tunnel houses.
Today, the business is fully containerised with an annual capacity of over two million seedlings.
Why the shift to containerised planting?
Along with the advantage of being able to scale up quicker, there were plenty of benefits that appealed to the Milnes. Most importantly, it opened the doors to all sorts of exciting automation, and Patrick found it a very easy and tidy operation once everything was established.
By controlling the growing environment, Patrick & Lynne have been able to extend their season. Aside from January and February, they are sending plants out until November and start again in March. They have been able to foster a wonderful, tight-knit team of mums with school-aged children, and have kept the working day mostly within school hours.
The numbers do the talking.
In 2024, the nursery comfortably handled 300,000 Eucalypts, 150,000 Hybrid Radiata, 50,000 ordinary Radiata, 350,000 Redwoods and the balance in other species. Most things are contracted today, “if we’re not contracted we look carefully before growing it” says Patrick. All plants go out in boxes on pallets and get delivered directly to planting sites for forestry companies and farm foresters (for carbon forests or smaller woodlots).
Natives are now being phased out because the nursery is less suited to native tree species. Patrick had hoped to dedicated 10 percent of the nursery to Beech, Totara and other native trees, but has found them to be problematic to grow at scale. “The preoccupation with eco-sourcing limits itself to where the seedlings will go, and the seed is variable from 3 months to 18 months – then if it does germinate, it’s hard work and a very manual process to keep the weeds out of the nursery.”
Nursery automation does the heavy lifting.
Nursery automation has been phased in over a 12-year duration. In Patrick’s words, here is a brief timeline:
DaRos RC2 Trayfiller – March 2013
First up was a Trayfiller (prior to this it was all done by hand). That just revolutionised things for us. The nursery went from one person doing a few hundred trays a day, to a few hundred an hour – a significant difference.
DaRos Seeder – November 2013
Another game-changer for the team, where one person used to sow 20-35 trays per day (at 1-4 seeds per cell) we increased to three people doing up to 1000 trays in a five-hour day. This kind of scaling up alters your entire business philosophy.
DaRos Overhead Irrigation Booms – October 2014
Next up, were overhead travelling irrigation booms in the seed growing tunnel house – for the first time we had good control of watering seed trays and young plants.
Venti V003 Trimmer – September 2016
The Trimmer was a major advancement for the nursery as the previous practice of topping trees with a hedge trimmer was tedious and somewhat difficult to ensure they were all uniformly topped. Progress rocketed from one person topping a few tables a day, to easily topping five tables an hour!
DaRos DP4 Tray Destacker – August 2018
The Destacker removed the menial task of manually putting trays into the Trayfiller, and also freed up a staff member to do much more useful work.
Plug Depopper – April 2022
This adjustable machine gently removes the young plants from their trays and has freed up two of our staff from using a single tray foot operated manual Depopper, allowing their efforts to shift to grading and packing – it works extremely well.
DaRos Overhead Irrigation Booms – May 2023 & November 2024
By the end of 2024 we’d installed overhead travelling irrigation booms across the 90% of the nursery. The booms have dramatically improved our watering capabilities. They do the whole nine yards – fertiliser, herbicide, insecticide, water and more.
A radio network has been set up in the nursery, enabling us to have smart phone access and control the booms remotely.
DaRos Transplanter – November 2024
A Transplanter makes sense as we’re doing more and more plants from cuttings. They’re grown in small jiffy plugs which need to be transplanted into cell trays for growing on for planting out. We hope to do 200,000 hybrids per year, which is a lot of transplanting effort by hand when a machine can replace it.
A continual program of improvement.
Southern Cypresses used to employ a lot of seasonal workers and students, but this is no longer required and has reduced staffing headaches considerably. Patrick still splits his time between the forest and the nursery. He adds, “Lynne runs the nursery and has it really humming. We could not achieve what we do without nursery automation – we certainly couldn’t do that number of seedlings with just 4-5 people.”
The Milnes son Kelvin is currently attending the School of Forestry at the University of Canterbury and will complete his education next year. Currently, he is very keen to eventually take over the business.
“It’s a fantastic succession plan to have in the wings, and we’ll continue to look at automating for greater success because it pays for itself reasonably quickly and the gear is easy to operate – it wouldn’t get used otherwise.”
If you could recommend anything to industry peers, what would it be?
“Don’t think about what to do next year – think longer-term! What’s your vision for the next 5-10 years, where do you want your business to be? As an example, with better foresight I would have designed our nursery facilities very differently. We began by growing a few plants, which soon shifted to “right let’s try a little containerised nursery”.
“If I’d known from the start that we’d shift to a containerised nursery, growing two million seedlings, the set up would look completely different (we’ve outgrown the current design). We would have all our nursery facilities in the middle and the plants growing around the outside, instead of having them down one end and the plants up the other.”
“We don’t need more land; we just needed our growing facilities in the middle! Because it takes time and effort to move seedlings around the nursery – from seeding to packing out, and the stages in between. Our seedlings are all on rolling tables so we’re not lifting things as such, but it’s getting them from A to B that can make all the difference. Have a clear vision of where you might want to be!”
Finally, if you are making big changes make sure it’s led by science not by gut feeling or YouTube videos! That’s not good for the industry (or the country). It’s numbers and science that are key.
Southern Cypresses is a shining example of hard graft, courage to invest in growth, and mechanisation playing its part.
If you are keen to join the nursery automation success-story, give us a call today!
