Celebrating 60 years of Rethinking the Everyday
The recipe for success requires one essential ingredient: a good story. Hustler Equipment’s story began in 1961 in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand in the shed of a family-owned orchard where visionary inventor Russell Currie was too busy “making stuff that makes the job easier” to get too worried about spraying or pruning fruit trees.
While such a tendency toward distraction might have worried a parent or a spouse, in Russell’s case, it ended up being the key to a successful multi-generational New Zealand machinery dynasty. From the introduction of the widest boom sprayer in the southern hemisphere in the 1960s, to the launch of their revolutionary Chainless bale feeders in the 1990s, to dozens of other industry-firsts all along the way, the Curries have been improving the everyday lives of farmers and ranchers around the world for six decades.
As the third generation of Curries takes over the company, CEO Brent Currie explains in the documentary that developing a new product “always stems from a customer need or a customer problem. If we’re not solving a problem, if we’re innovating for the sake of innovation, we’re not really adding much value.”
Sixty years and four generations of “petrol heads” fine-tuning the innovative process definitely helped Hustler marinate into a well-oiled machine, continually introducing more and better solutions for farmers around the world at regular intervals. Of course, their genuine affection and care for their employees, dealers and customers definitely helped.
Today, Hustler Equipment exports their machines all around the world, helped by their offices in the United States, Australia and Europe. “Now we’re probably doing more containers in a week than we would have done in six months,” estimated Rob Weaver, Former Operations Manager.
Where does Hustler plan to be in another 60 years? “We’ve got less time to do more. The pace of life is faster, everything’s faster. So we’re going to ramp up faster,” says James Currie, Chairman of Hustler and Russell Currie’s son.
Brent adds, “There are a lot of things that we’ve got on the table, even today that the market would have no idea about, that we will bring to the market in two, three, and even five years down the track.”
Coming in at a little under twenty minutes, you might want to brew up a nice cup of coffee or tea, and kick your feet up before hitting play, but since it covers sixty years of progress in the world of livestock farm machinery, it does tend to fly by.
