Systems, Safety, and Stepping Up with Matt Eckert

Jun 29, 2025

Podcast Highlights

In this episode of Hay Matters, brought to you by LocalAg and Feed Central, host Jon Paul Driver concludes his three-part series with South Australian farmer Matt Eckert. This final instalment shifts focus to the financial, mechanical, and personal pressures that often sit behind the paddock – and how Matt and his team are navigating them.

From soaring machinery costs and safety scares to family life, team trust, and planning for the future, this conversation reveals the daily challenges that aren’t always get discussed, but shape everything on the farm.

  • Why machinery costs are blowing out and how that’s reshaping timelines for soil improvement and capital investment
  • What efficiency really looks like across an operation, and how mismatched upgrades can create new bottlenecks
  • Lessons from scaling up hay production, from baler selection to matching loaders, trucks and shed space
  • How past safety incidents have prompted changes in processes and a stronger focus on risk management
  • Why trust and teamwork are central to how the farm operates today and how stepping back has helped others step up
  • The juggling act of parenting, marriage and leadership and how Matt is learning to keep farm pressures from following him home
  • What tough seasons have taught Matt and why backing your people makes all the difference
Read Transcript

Jon Paul Driver 0:00
Welcome to the Hay Matters podcast brought to you by LocalAg and Feed Central. This is your go to source for all things hay related in Australia. I’m your host, Jon Paul driver in today’s episode, we’re joined for a third time, by Matt Eckert, welcome back.

Matt Eckert 0:22
Yeah. G’day, Jon, thank you very much for having me absolute privilege to be asked.

Jon Paul Driver 0:27
You know a story that comes to my mind. You mentioned the fire interestingly I was in, well, it would have been probably still going on, just as I was visiting your farm in August of 23 there was a fire going here. They burnt 10,000 acres in about 12 hours, and it’s all timber, tree ground, Yes, yep. And it burnt right up to one of my hay barns. And the thing that saved it was the neighbour jumping on the cat and pushing fire lines. It stopped. The fire stopped, where the neighbour came and jumped on well, that it’s a leased farm that I have, and the old time farmer that’s since retired had a small John Deere cat there with a six way blade on it. The neighbour jumped on it and started pushing fire lines. And I’m sure, as I was at your farm, I was looking at pictures of him coming back with holes burnt in his shirt and the soles of his boots melted. And that sense of community is the thing that comes to my mind as you talk about the this adversity.

Matt Eckert 1:33
Yeah, definitely, Jon. And I remember you being here talking about that, and you’re very stressed at the time, weren’t you? And, yeah, but, you know, people have got your back, haven’t they…

Speaker 1 1:45
I mean, honestly, I put the hay in the barn and I didn’t call the insurance agent before I left for Australia. So it was a full shed of hay. And how many tonnes it was doesn’t really matter, because it mattered a lot to me at the time, and it was saved.

Matt Eckert 2:03
Yeah, that’s it. And I’ll just one thing here, Jon wrote down, just to talk about, you know, my my biggest grind at the moment in our industry moving forward, is just the cost of inputs, probably being number one. That’s our single biggest individual cost, that and followed by the cost of machinery. Jon, I just cannot fathom the cost of machinery. Now it’s, you know, I remember when we started deep ripping and little, you know, just young blokes, just full throttle, and we sat down and worked out our numbers, and we bought a brand new quad track to do it, and it was 460,000 and sort of, do your numbers, and you think, well, if I allow, sort of, you know, six to 650 1000 to for the new one, by the time I’ve worn this out, you know, that’ll be plenty. And you wear it out, we just put nearly 10,000 hours on it, and you wear it. And you get to the point and you think about trading it up, and you’re like, you need a million dollars, Jon. You think Jesus mate, like, I was not budgeting this, like I added on a few 100 extra 1000 and thought that’ll be plenty. And so I genuinely say, like the cost of soil amelioration has is double what we ever thought it was going to be. But then, in saying that, you know, me and Tim will often say it, yes, it’s costly, but the cost of doing nothing is greater, so we’ve just got to manage it, to fit in with what we can afford to do at the times and you know, just slow and steady sort of is going to get there in the end, but it just the cost of that. It’s, it’s just double what we even budgeted. And I just don’t even know where the money went, Jon, like, just, you know, blows your mind. And when we’re doing you talk about machinery and stuff, and how you run your machinery, and big sensor, a lot of farms out there, and he’d put a couple 1002, 3000 hours on a machine, and it’s sort of like you’re made fuel by your dealers, and it’s time to trade them up and stuff. And we just can’t afford to do that. Jon, so that hence why we’ve got the workshop in which we’ve got. We do all our own maintenance and everything, and made the thing now that we’ll trade our machinery up when it’s not doing what it needs to do. And we’re buying new. We buy purchase new, but we run it for a long time, and we put, like our quad tracks, nearly 10,000 hours. Another one of our big artics is nearly 10,000 hours. Just done a full overhaul on that, had all the diffs out, everything, rebuild everything on that. You know, our fence are all, you know, six, I think the youngest one, 6000 hours, up to 12,000 hours sort of thing. But, yeah, it just blows my mind how our machinery has just got, it’s got so expensive, but yet it seems to just not be last. Thing as long, and we get the hours on them quick, and we just, I don’t know where it’s going to stop, Jon, we’ve got to see a level. And we, at some point, we can’t, you know, can’t keep paying that type of money for machines not to do things like soil amelioration and stuff. I think you just got to learn to fix it yourself and keep that old. And the parts too right?

Jon Paul Driver 5:21
The parts are a nightmare.

Matt Eckert 5:24
Parts will be the death of me. Jon, just getting the right ones, just getting the right ones I have my parts, the numbers right here in front of me that I went to the I gotta buy some John Deere parts. And I went to JD PC, the John Deere parts catalogue. And yep, they have all the parts diagrams. And I look at them, and I go and look for the serial number breaks. And I go and double check the serial number, and I think that I have the right part. And then I call the parts guy, and I ask for the good one, and it I tell him the serial number, and he looks up. And if we both agree, then I’ll order the parts. But if we’re not on the exact same page on every single thing, nope, we’ll try this another day. We’re going to come back to this, because the time it takes to do that properly is horrendous.

Matt Eckert 6:22
Yes, it’s a very big challenge. You know, I say that, you know, you’ve got mechanics in the workshop and stuff. I just sometimes just jump in the ute and drive to Adelaide and have a look at what you need to get. Sometimes it just gets beyond you, and you think you get it right, and then it turns up, and it’s infuriating, but, yeah, I just, it’s a big thing. Machinery cost is just, it’s just out of control. And our dealers are just not getting any cheaper to use. You can’t afford to use them anymore. Really. You just, you really got to be doing your own servicing and maintenance as much as you can. It just the margins are just tightening up so much that that’s the only way I can sort of keep the wheels turning, really, especially if you want to do a lot of work so on, on things like soil amelioration, that aren’t necessarily a high cash flow instant return result, they’re a long game.

Speaker 1 7:18
I mean, you’re hoping to get your money back on that over the course of 20 years? Yeah, definitely, those are the type of time horizons that you’re thinking about.

Matt Eckert 7:27
Yes, it is. And the trap is just aren’t doing 20 years worth of work. That’s the problem. But yeah, and yeah, another one of mine at Tim’s big things is efficiency. Like we focus on efficiency every day, Jon, that’s a big part of what we do. But don’t get too deep in efficiency thinking you need the biggest and the best for efficiency to be efficient. Efficiency is balancing up and making the process to make the process as efficient as you can. It’s about having the right capacity machines for that job. And with machinery purchasing, you have to be so careful that everything you purchase there’s not a reaction. Well, every action has a reaction. And you think, you know, I’ll buy a bigger header, and then you can’t physically move the grain that reaps, or you’ll buy a bigger seeder. And then you sprayer, physically can’t spray the hectares ahead of it. So, so looking at that efficiency across the entire machinery plan is very important.

Speaker 1 8:33
You know, balancing, you just, I call that balancing the equipment compliment.

Matt Eckert 8:37
It is. And I mean, we run John Deere headers, they’re not the biggest capacity. Because we run our own trucks and card our own grain, there’s a limiting factor on the actual physical grain we can move. So we don’t necessarily look at the header that reaps the most grain per hour. We look at the header that will reap the most grain the most hours in a day with some minimal breakdowns, most reliability. And that’s why we run, say, John Deere headers. And we could get two big, you know, big twin roading New Orleans, or even x9 John Deere, but you physically can’t move the grain. Then you create another bottleneck. You create inefficiencies. So trying to balance all of that, that machinery up. I mean, I remember, we’ll talk about the hay side of things, because, you know, that’s the Central’s game. I remember, you know, we …

Jon Paul Driver 9:34
….and so many processes that have huge amount of processes that are dependent upon one another and dependent upon whether there’s humidity or rain…

Jon Paul Driver 10:30
yeah, and lifting three of those is a completely different game, yeah.

Matt Eckert 10:34
So we had to step up there. So we stepped up our loaders, our shed capacities and things like that. And then we went on that on the eighth year trip, and we come back just, we just got to have a chrome. You just got to have an eight string of Chrome for the outcome that we wanted to achieve. It’s the only machine to run. And so went the eight string of Chrome. Bane couldn’t lift the bales again. Jon, next level, you know. And we went from stacking them six high to stacking them nine high. We went from moving four bales at once to five bales at once. We went from wheeled rakes to rotary rakes. And now we’ve got the entire system working now. And, you know, go out now and we rake bale. We have a mill stack stacker coming behind, and then we have a couple of trucks running the hay back to the sheds, and it’s quite incredible. When you line up the efficiency levels across the entire enterprise. It’s amazing to watch. It’s, you know, like the baler will go out, it’ll be bailing by the next morning. Say, you bail five or 600 bales by the next morning, they’re in the shed, stacked. It’s incredible to watch it. It’s a it’s an unreal process. When you get that efficiency across the entire system working, and you get the and you get the right guys on the jobs, just amazing what you can achieve. But, like, I say, no point having four balers or, you know,

Speaker 1 11:56
If you don’t have the truck or the rakes for it, if you have any bottleneck in that process. You can spend all the money in the world on a baler, but if you don’t have the rakes or the trucks, it doesn’t matter.

Matt Eckert 12:07
It doesn’t work. It’s an entire it’s an entire process, and it’s all got to be calculated to work. And we’ve finally got their own in the last sort of 10 years where our systems work. And then, you know, another one I just wrote down here, Jon like a bit, you know, employees and stuff like, our business is built on employees and people. It’s built on family and then our employees, our team members, I guess you would say. And we’re just very fortunate to have such a great team of guys. We’re giving them more and more and more responsibilities sort of every sort of season, I guess. You know, we’ve always had good people. And I just, yeah, I just love employing people and helping them grow their personal lives too. And you know, like you got to treat every one of your team members individually, if you know what I mean. Like everyone is different. Everyone has different priorities in life, you know, I’ve got one lad that works here at the moment. He’s got triplet kids, ah, so his life is just full on mate, like, oh, and I don’t know how he juggles it. He’s an absolute machine, you know, he comes to work and works. He’s, you know, 50 odd hours a week, and his partner works in Murray Bridge, and she’d be working 40 odd hours a week. And yet, they juggle this family life and these triplets is it’s unreal to watch. I’ve got one child, and I struggle with balancing that, Jon and is your child, someone’s just about to turn two. So, yeah, got got a little daughter. Yeah, she’s turning into, I guess. What do they call it, the terrible twos or something, isn’t it?

Jon Paul Driver 13:51
So, so I my son, Cieran, just hit 10 months.

Matt Eckert 13:55
Yeah, right. Oh, congratulations. Yeah, yeah. So, very challenging times, very rewarding. Yes, I just marvel at Daniel. I just can’t believe how he does it with triplets.

Jon Paul Driver 14:07
It must be full on. Earlier you were talking about adversity makes you think differently, and immediately. Now having a little one, there’s this concept that immediately, how do I say this immediately after becoming a parent, your brain works differently, and it’s because you have to rise to the occasion, and you just figure out what you have to do, and you just make it work. And it doesn’t matter how many times you’re up into the middle of the night with a bottle or changing diapers, just all of the all of those things right, that come with being a parent and all of the regular life that comes along with it, and the adversity that that you’re experiencing with the drought, it’s almost that same type of situation where you choose. Just figure it out because you don’t have any other option.

Matt Eckert 15:05
Yeah, you’re right. I mean, and it’s, it’s tough to sometimes figure it out, isn’t it, and it can be challenging,

Jon Paul Driver 15:11
And you still do the wrong things.

Matt Eckert 15:14
I make mistakes all the time. I mean, I’m far from perfect. I’m in that process at the moment where I’m really trying to juggle that family life at the moment, as well as work like, I say, very lucky to have the team of guys that we have here. It makes mine and Tim’s life so much easier. But still, you know, you’re just very fortunate to have the most amazing wife like she just, she’s a nurse, a clinical nurse at Murray Bridge, and she’s, you know, been a nurse. You’re pretty robust and sort of understand what you’re doing a bit. And thank God I got her gone, because we froze. He had to rely on me looking after I would be in trouble.

Jon Paul Driver 15:53
I think I could do it, but I wouldn’t want to have to.

Matt Eckert 15:56
That’s exactly what I’m sort of saying. I’d manage. But, you know, just very lucky to have me by my side doing that, and I’m I try my best to not take my problems home, especially during the drought. I really do try my best, but sometimes they do just come out. And you just, you know, dad struggled with the dryer, probably, probably more than me and Tim, just from that livestock side of things, and that always brings tension and stress. And I try not to take it home, Jon, but sometimes it just follows me home. And it’s not what I try to do, but I’m trying very hard to get better at that, and not necessarily take that home to my wife and child.

Jon Paul Driver 16:39
So it is part of the support network, though it is.

Matt Eckert 16:44
But I just, you know, she’s always, she’s there and stuff, but you know, she’s got her own things going on. We’re pregnant at the moment again with our second now. So thank you. We’re just at 20 weeks now, so she’s doing a tremendous effort, really. And like, you know, I’ve been away a bit in the trucks lately, just trying to make it make up a bit of lost ground, I guess. And she she’s handled that very well, so very fortunate to have her, and I admire what she does. She’s a nurse, you know? She spends her life saving people’s lives, and always puts other people’s welfare before her own. That’s probably the problem, but I remember Jon, we’re getting sidetracked here, but you know, you talk about things going wrong, and never really fully understood what Megan maybe did as a job until, like, back in 2021 when we started building the workshop, we had one of the columns, nine metres, 610, UB, universal beam columns. They are, and it’s a pretty hefty sort of post, I guess. And we brought a load of them home from Horsham. We had them on the truck, and we were down there just by the way, bridge, you know where you drive in there, right on, right on the bloody road there. And we’ll unloading them. And my brother let go a ratchet strap, and one of the columns come tumbling off the top of the truck, landed on the back of my shoulders and broke my back, broke six vertebrae on my back. And yeah, what wasn’t was not good at all. And I was very lucky to survive that. And just an inch different, Jon would have taken my head off. And you know, my brother, one of our guys, was there at the time. And you know, you ring the ambulance and they all come out. And you know, a wife’s a nurse, and she’s at Murray Bridge and sort of thing, Jesus, you know, like things aren’t going well. You sort of can’t feel your feet. You just, you wonder whether you’re going to walk again. And anyway, I was very lucky, and it wasn’t until I was getting dragged through the door, was at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and we, we getting wheeled in there. Megan’s coming in behind me. She’s walking in, and it’s like, you walking into your workplace, and she’s like, how you going, mate? How you going, how you going. She’s saying g’day to everyone she knows everybody. Everyone knows her. And it’s then you realise you know what she does as a job and how important what she does is. And very lucky to have her, and it was a scary day. So also for her, probably myself, but, yeah, don’t wish that on anyone, but I’m very lucky. I got out of the bad situation by the skin of my teeth. And, you know, I suffer with my back now, a lot from it, but shit like I’m here walking, and it’s just so close. It wasn’t funny.

Jon Paul Driver 19:19
Just the other day, a friend of mine dropped a hitch on a cult Packer on his left foot and broke all of his toes safety on the farm, I nearly cut my left thumb off of my own doing. And it’s just a moment.

Matt Eckert 19:37
It only takes a moment it does. And I just, I was just going through some photos with mum and dad there, and I said, Dad. I said, Jesus mate. Like, we’re pretty loose back in the day, and it’s because of things like that have happened that have made us really look at our systems, I guess. And we just don’t do that sort of stuff anymore. Jon, you know? I mean, it’s just looking at a photo of dad building, the work of the building, the ship. Earring shed back in would have been the early 1990s and had this John Deere loader. It’d be about a it was a JD 500 loader power shift with a 720 loader on it, yellow one and industrial loader. Yeah, they had. They’d bolted a 30 foot windmill tower to the bucket, and then they’d lift the trusses up on the end of this windmill tower, yeah? And then they’d lift them right up, get them into position, and then they’d climb up the windmill tower to get up and unlock the chain. And you just think, oh my god mate. Like, just unbelievable. And they’re doing this under the power lines, and you’re thinking, Jesus Christ, yeah, it’s this recipe for disaster, you know. And then they had their scaffolding. They had this old ACCO C 1800 truck, and they they put the stock crate on it, they tip the hoist up and stand on the top deck of the crate, tip it right up in the air. And that’s how they was getting up to get the bolts in and stuff like that. And just like, imagine that Jon, like lifting it to iron, just crushing the bloke in the top of it, or something like that, you know. So, yeah, got a buddy, 50 tonne hydraulic hoist, lifting the art mate, right? Oh, yeah. But they got it done though, you know, my dad and my papa. They were innovative people. They built all their own sheds, and, yeah, you know, things like that, got us to where we are today, but certainly is why we have a lot of other systems implemented now, you know, with safety on the farm and just making sure we sort of manage those issues, if we can, we just don’t do that silly stuff anymore. I can’t believe we ever did it. Jon looking through those photos thinking, oh my god, oh my god.

Jon Paul Driver 21:45
Anyway, except you have to, at some point. You have to make those decisions as to what’s to be done and what’s not going to be done. And sometimes I wonder, I mean, I take farm safety way more, way more carefully, way more seriously than I ever have, but you just find yourself in those spots sometimes where you’re going, I shouldn’t be doing this. Ah, this is dumb. I hope I survive.

Matt Eckert 22:11
Yeah, I understand that feeling, and I know very well. But you know, you have a few things go wrong, and you sort of think, you know, you got kids at home now, and all my guys have kids at home, and yep, you just not you just can’t do it. You just gotta find the right way to do it. Do it safely.

Jon Paul Driver 22:30
We’re just putting our baler back together, and we noticed a crack on the back the plunger. Nothing really major. Just needed to grind it out and weld it up a little bit, and my hired man was doing that today, and the exact words that came out of my mouth, you goddamn better, well, put the brake on the flywheel, not pulling you out of that machine squished. It’s

Matt Eckert 22:55
big thing in that when that flywheel starts turning so you’re obviously under somewhere by the knives there…

Jon Paul Driver 23:00
Nothing you could do to swell is on the backside of the plunger?

Matt Eckert 23:03
Yes, very dangerous spot to be. You get in there and you hang your legs down, don’t you, or something like that, you will lose them that you won’t stop that flywheel. No. So no, it’s you often think that when I’m in in the baler chamber there, you know you’re cleaning out, and you sort of think she might just get out and go and put that break on, mate, yeah, because it wasn’t the chrome baler. I don’t know what the flower weighs in the Chrome baler, but once that’s that’s turn, Johnny ain’t gonna stop it’s got to be half a tonne or more, isn’t it? Oh, I think it’s, yeah, it’s five or 600 kilos. Take your fingers off, that’s for sure. Oh, yeah, you just don’t stop it. So the gear ratio that it’s geared down, it’ll crunch, yeah.

Jon Paul Driver 23:43
Well, the older I get, the more particular I get. And we’ve talked about employees…

Matt Eckert 23:50
When you get to the scalability about what we do now, you just you got to really sit down and go, I can’t do it all. I have to accept the job that they do, and be happy with the job they do. And one of the biggest ways to make your guys grow is remove yourself. Just go and do something else, mate, just I just jump in a truck and disappear, and I come home and things are done, they seem to be so much more productive without me there. So you just slowly start to remove yourself. You know, you let them, yep, let them have a day on the cedar. And then you start letting them start it in the morning themselves. And over time, all of a sudden, you you’re just turning up, like Tim just turns up at the cedar at six o’clock at night, jumps on it, drives it till midnight, turns and off goes home again. And you know, you just, it’s a challenge. It’s a challenging thing. It really is.

Jon Paul Driver 24:43
One of my favourite parts is when you find something, a task where your employee is obviously better than you. I mean, this is one of the reasons that you hire people in the business world. You Yes, the CEO of the bank. Is not the financial modeller, right? No, he wants to hire a really good financial modeller.

Matt Eckert 25:05
I mean, teams always said that we need to employ smarter people than us.

Speaker 1 25:10
Oh, yeah. Well, this series has been absolutely wonderful. Thank you so much for all of your thoughts and your perspective on drought and family, it’s all been wonderful.

Matt Eckert 25:24
Thank you, Jon. And yeah, once again, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be involved. And yeah, I wish you all the best for your season over there, too.

Speaker 1 25:32
Thank you very much. Thank you. This podcast is proudly presented by Feed Central and LocalAg, stay tuned for upcoming episodes.

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