PART 3 of 4

“We got our lawyers involved – but because we hadn’t been paid anything for 20 machines already manufactured – we counter sued them for

$3 million.”

James and June recall it was a traumatic time.

They hired lawyers at a huge expense who tried to negotiate an agreement.

“That was fair enough – but those fellas at Track Marshall were so slimy,” James recalled.

“Graham Heslop – we called him hiccup because he changed his mind all the time.”

The case got to the point of conciliation with a hired Queen’s Counsel (QC) at $12,000 per day, the cost of which was shared with Track Marshall.

James recalls the negotiations clearly. Track Marshall had flown two of its negotiators out from the UK and they all met at a lawyer’s chambers somewhere at the top end of Collins Street.

“I was buoyed by the fact that the QC rolled his eyes in response to hearing what Track Marshall had to say,” James said.

“There was a stalemate – they wouldn’t pay – and we said we wouldn’t pay.

James said they asked him if he would settle for $1.5 million – meaning he had to pay them $1.5m.

“No,” he said.

“At this point, they still hadn’t paid anything for the machines we had given them.”

James and June were then asked if they would pay $300,000.

“We told them we would think about it overnight,” James said.

“June and I walked home, and we were walking down Spring Street and June stopped. She took me by the hand and said – I don’t care if I live in a tent –

we are not paying a cent.”

“I felt so relieved at that point,” James said.

James and June walked back to the hotel where they were staying, feeling quite relieved at their decision.

The next day back at the negotiating table in Collins Street they told Track Marshall that they would not be paying anything.

“You can go back to England,” James said.

“That’s what I told them.

“They paid all that money to fly out from England but wouldn’t budge.”

Before that, James and June had hired a private detective, who had previously worked for Buckingham Palace, to do some investigating behind the scenes to see why Track Marshall were having “problems” with the tractors.

“He was fantastic,” June said.

“He interviewed farmers and investigated why they were having problems and he found out that the problems were all their own doing.”

James and June said it was a protracted legal saga which lasted about four years and cost a lot of money.

What they hadn’t known at the time, was the directors had stripped Track Marshall of all its assets and put them into another company called Compact Systems. 

“So even if we’d won, there was nothing to pay us,” James said.

“We never got paid for what we did for them – all those tractors under warranty sent in containers – nothing.

“Then their company folded anyway.”

John Deere United States,

here we come

It was during the course of all that legal saga that the next poignant incident in their venture occurred.

It was Christmas Eve, 1989, June recalls.

James was in the shower because they were getting ready to go to the Christmas Eve church service in Tarrington.

The telephone rang.

June answered and went and told James that someone from John Deere was on the phone.

“I was in no mood to talk at that point in time because of all the disappointments we had had with larger companies,” James said.

“I won’t tell you what I said but it meant go and get lost.”

On the end of the telephone was a senior director at John Deere Continental, the parent company of John Deere, asking if James was interested in talking to them about his invention – the TRAC 200 rubber tracks.

“Yeah ok,” James said.

And so began the business relationship between Waltanna and John Deere.

Confidential and non-disclosure agreements were drawn up for both parties to sign.

“My lawyers drew up an agreement,” James said. 

But James said the legal terminology his lawyers drew up in the 26-page document only served to confuse the Americans.

“We spent a week going back and forth on the telephone to the US trying to explain the jargon; hereto, henceforth, thus, and so on,” he said.

“The poor Americans didn’t know what the heck we were talking about.”

Eventually John Deere’s American chief legal adviser, Kevin Moriarty, sent six pages of a document that said, “we will keep confidential what you tell us, and you will keep confidential what we tell you.”

Shortly afterwards, upon invitation, James travelled to the US and took with him his accountant and business mentor Andrew Anderson to inspect their technical centre and talk about the Waltanna product.

James said they took a sequence of flights, including the puddle jumper from Chicago, down to the Quad Cities in the US; Rock Island, Moline and East Moline in Illinois, and Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa.

The meeting took place at Moline on the Mississippi River, on the border of Illinois and Iowa.

At one point during negotiations, James and Andrew left the room to allow the John Deere executives to hold a private conversation.

“I’d never been so nervous,” James said.

“In those days I still smoked cigarettes.

“I reckon I had four cigarettes in

half an hour.”

James speaks fondly of the relationships he formed with the John Deere US team, including Tom Myers.

“Eventually, they decided they liked what I was doing, and said, they thought it would fit with what they were doing,” James said.

“We were at the right place at the right time.

“We had secrets others hadn’t thought of and John Deere could see that.”

A Joint Development Agreement was made, and James soon got an order to build a track system for their industrial crawler, followed shortly afterwards by an order for a harvester. 

“We also built suspension to go with the tracks, which was a drawcard,” James said.

James recalls that when they started out working with John Deere – he and June were in debt because of the need to invest so much in the early 1990s, perfecting the rubber tracks and with product development.

“We were up to here (signals his eyeballs) in debt.”

“But we did get paid very well for the projects we developed for John Deere – the first cheque we got for the first commercial agreement for the licence paid off all our debt altogether.

“After that, June and I vowed we would never go into debt again,” James said.

“The Westpac Bank nearly broke us twice.

“Those were the days when interest rates were up 17, 18 or 19 per cent.

“If it wasn’t for us knowing a bit more than they (the bank) thought we did, we would have gone bankrupt.

“They just wanted to keep lending us money.

“June and I resisted.”

James said the bank also tried to offer overseas loans in Swiss Francs, Deutschmark or English Pounds.

“That would mean you would pay the interest rate from the country of origin,” he said.

“So, if you borrowed USD, you would only be paying four or five per cent at their rate instead of AUD at 18 or 19 per cent.

“But what happened when the exchange rate changed – they wanted their money back – and a lot of farmers had to sell their farm to pay it.

“I knew what it was like because when we were importing components out of the US, June and I established a US account out of Westpac.

“We bought USD and put it into an account. 

“We were only getting four or five per cent on the interest rate but that didn’t matter – when we had to pay, we had to pay in USD.”

As the relationship with John Deere developed, it became clear to James and June that they were people of their word.

“They were honest and friendly – totally the opposite to Track Marshall in the UK – but they also paid on time for the work we did,” James said.

James said there was never any need to go back and review the agreement with John Deere because they were such honest people. 

“The interesting thing was that when you were with John Deere – they never talked about who was not in the room at the time,” he said.

“Many other companies did that – you’d go out for dinner, and all they’d be discussing was who wasn’t there – but John Deere never did that.”

James said he has around 23 patents that John Deere owned, where he is nominated as the inventor.

The relationship went right through to 2005 when eventually John Deere took all their own product development back in-house and developed their own software, and eventually the business relationship came to an end.

“I am very proud of our relationship with John Deere and all that we achieved with that venture,” James said.

He and June hope to return to the US next year for a swansong – to renew acquaintances with people like Merv Kyzlyk and Tom Myers – “all those guys have retired now”.

James said other highlights of his career were being engaged to do projects for Versatile – a Canadian company that was owned by Ford New Holland, as well as Massey Ferguson and others.

They were also engaged by a Norwegian company, Western Geco, to build rubber tracks for 50 tonne unit seismic survey machines.

“Our tracks have been used in the desert in the Sahara, in Saudia Arabia in the Middle East, and Northern Africa to go up and down the sandhills at 50 degrees Celsius and -50 below in Alaska.”

Over time and concurrently with the manufacturing and technology exporting component of their family enterprise, Waltanna Farms also diversified into organic production, mostly under the directorship of son, Michael.

James also credits one of Waltanna’s most loyal and longest serving employees, Murray Rogers, as pivotal to the company’s success.

“The guy that helped us all the way through was Murray Rogers,” he said.

“He is mad keen on drag cars and that sort of stuff and has a heart of gold.”

James credits Murray’s thought process as being aligned to his.

“He’d say - hey chief – whad’ya think of this? -  and he’d get a bit of chalk out and draw something on the concrete floor of it,” James said.

James credits Murray with coming up with all sorts of improvements to designs.

“That’s how we built our first rubber track machine,” he said.

James and June’s son Michael started an apprenticeship as a welder and construction engineer under Murray.

“Michael was very accomplished in his workmanship and could put his hand to anything … painting and other things as well,” James said.

Michael created his own business stream by bringing in components from Hungarian engineering and manufacturing company, Rába Axle.

Michael has become a skilled director in a professional partnership with his wife Bronnie in the new food production and exporting facility, presently being built at Waltanna.

Waltanna includes crop farming, fine wool and producing, processing, and packaging flaxseed oil, among various other agricultural pursuits from their certified organic paddocks.

Generally speaking, James has experienced good health apart from a couple of bouts of tachycardia, the first at about the age of 50 out in the paddock. June rushed out to pick him up and flew back home with the dogs on the back to get to the hospital.

On the way, June was pulled over for speeding by local policeman, Graeme Petering, who’d been hiding on M Campbells Road in Strathkellar.

Mr Petering offered to drive the patient to hospital himself in the police car and James said he’d been told that Petering made the comment upon arrival at emergency, “the only other person I’ve seen that colour was dead”.

But the miracle, as James calls it, was that he woke up the next morning in hospital and said he never felt like a cigarette since.

“The urge just left me,” he said.

“I’d tried to give up for years, but after that I never gave them another thought.”

CONTINUED: NEXT SATURDAY