Getting to the bottom of it

Scotty Newman and his team clean out woolsheds - not inside, but the decades worth of compacted sheep manure underneath.

The shortest time anyone has worked for Scotty Newman is four hours.

"They lasted four hours and then grabbed their bag out of the truck and walked out to the main road and hitched home," Scotty says.

Scotty has a business clearing out sheep manure from under woolsheds. In some sheds, the manure is almost two metres deep - and is pushing up through the grated floors.

It is dry, compacted and many decades old on the bottom and wet and sometimes reeking of ammonia on top.

Scotty and his team of two dig out as much as they can from the sides of a wool shed using long-reach shovels attached to a mini digger but much of their work is done in the dark, under the floor, using miners' lamps and handheld shovels.

They're kneeling as they heap shovelful after shovelful onto conveyor belts Scotty has designed.

"You just start with the first shovelful. And every shovelful is a winner. Once it's out, it's gone and on with the next one - you just set little goals."

It's been 17 years since Scotty drove his first shovel into sheep muck.

"In 2004, we had the floods in Feilding and I was a fencing contractor at that time, and the government put on Task Force Green (work teams).  And so they were doing all the repairs and maintenance on farms for free ... so I was kind of inadvertently made redundant.

"And I hit up a mate who had a woolshed and I said to him, just to keep me going, 'Can I clean out under your woolshed? You know, I'll just do it the old fashioned way, with a  shovel and a wheelbarrow'.  And after two days of doing it like that, I thought, man, somebody's got to put a little thought into this."

Since then, Scotty estimates he's ploughed $700,000 into building equipment to make the job easier.

"Not easy, just easier."

He's the only contractor in New Zealand clearing out woolsheds as a full-time job. It requires him and his team to be away from home, Monday to Friday.

They put their heads down in shearers' quarters or in the wool room.

"You can't be too fussy ... we've got camp stretchers and mattresses we carry with us. It's not home, it's not home."

Farmers cleanout woolsheds to protect the building. If its foundations sit in sheep manure they can rot, Scotty says.

The biggest job he has completed was removing 388 tonnes of manure from a woolshed at Tautane station near Herbertville. It took eight days but, because access to the shed was so good, 85 percent of it could be extracted using machinery.

"The worst job that we've done, as far as we weren't able to get the machines in there, was up the back of Wairoa and we took out 297 tonnes. And that was all by hand - the whole lot - because the piles were so close together that the machines ... couldn't fit between the piles to help us to get it out. We had the height, but we didn't have the space between the piles. That was character building."

Scotty says unfortunately there's no market for the manure.

"It's the best organic product that there is, but what it costs to get it from here to town to process it, it's too expensive. So we just dump it to waste.

"It's beautiful stuff. My son grew a pumpkin for school in it. It was a 104-kilo pumpkin, the next closest biggest one was 46 kilos. We had to use the digger to put it on the cattle scales to weigh the blinkin' thing. It didn't do the bathroom scales any favours."

This week Scotty is working on a King Country farm near Aria.

He thought there were 80 tonnes to clear out, turns out there was more like 160 tonnes.

Vincent Nikora is working with him. It's his sixth week on the job.

"I'm loving it ... it's good pay. It's sort of my taste in work. I love hard work and the outdoors, not in cities or you know with a lot of people around."

Scotty says he's worked in some beautiful, historic sheds; the oldest was built in 1889.

And he has advice for people building a new woolshed.

"Come and see me first," he laughs."I'll give you some ideas on widths and heights and all those things so it makes our job so much easier. Build the bloody thing higher. Get it higher off the ground so we can get underneath there. Have the piles a little bit wider apart so we can fit between them. That's the difference. Access is the key."