Ben North from Viper Water Solutions hailed his first year exhibiting at the Richmond Field Days a great success for his fledgling Hughenden-based family business.
Viper Water Solutions, which is completely Australian owned, manufactures and supplies their own range of poly pipe as well as other farm related products. It has been in operation since September 2019 and since then has grown significantly to supply products to a range of stakeholders from farms and cattle stations, to mines and irrigation projects.
"We manufacture our own range of poly pipe. It's all made to Australian standards and the factory is based in Hughenden, which is a good central location for distributing through most parts of Queensland," Mr North said.
"We've got customers as far as Alice Springs in the NT, up towards Katherine and south as far as NSW. We're very busy.
As a new business owner in poly pipe manufacturing, Mr North said he is sometimes questioned on how it's produced.
"We're regulated by the industry standards, the same as everybody else, so the customer has full peace of mind to know that when they buy our pipe it's to the highest quality and our warranties are all identical to match.
"We took a fair risk in placing the factory in Hughenden, however there was a lot of strategy involved in that decision. It is very hard to get staff out there but we kept pushing ahead and now we have 14 full time staff and we operate 24 hours a day. It has certainly been a challenge but it has definitely worked."
Missing last year's event due to the pandemic, Mr North was quick to seize the opportunity to showcase his business in 2021.
"At the moment we manufacture from 20mm up to 160mm poly pipe. We also customise our coil sizes so we can make things to suit the user," he said.
"One of the very popular sizes in the rural areas is 63mm poly pipe and we can make that up to 1km in a coil; so that's been popular as well to save on not only freight, but the fittings as well."