Solly hauls a New Year Honour

Five Nelson Tasman locals have been awarded 2025 New Years Honours. Throughout Tuesday, Nelson App shares each of their stories.

If you’ve been a road user within the past 97 years, you’ve probably caught sight of an emerald freight truck labelled ‘Sollys’.

The family company’s third generation driving force Merv Solly has been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2025 New Year Honours for services to the transport industry and business.

It’s been a long journey for the working-class bloke who’s lived in Collingwood for 76 of his 77 years, and who was already driving Bedford 5 ton trucks at age 12 at Sollys recently defunct transport yard in Rockville.

He contemplated “quite hard” whether to accept the royal honour but says Sollys service and his other ventures which have steered the course for a prosperous rural sector was the clincher.

Merv’s grandfather Ken started up Sollys in 1928 and it grew to have more than a dozen operational vehicles carrying out traditional rural carriers’ work for the farming community and local dairy co-op.

With Merv at the helm since 1978 after delivering freight in Golden Bay with the company, he has revolutionised the small rural transport operation to a national heavyweight.

Sollys today comprises 130 trucks and 180 staff, with its head office in Tākaka and depots in Richmond, Blenheim, Christchurch, and Greymouth.

It has acquired marine shipping, farming and coal distribution companies, and provides nationwide freight services, construction and earthmoving services, road maintenance, coastal protection, and supplies raw materials from its quarries to support New Zealand’s agriculture and infrastructure industries.

Merv was inducted into the New Zealand Road Transport Hall of Fame in 2016 for his outstanding contribution to the road transport industry.

His plaudits also include the purchase of the Dolomite Quarry in Golden Bay in 2007, commencing soil testing and creating calcium and magnesium and other biological mixes for New Zealand and overseas farms, vineyards and orchards.

“We saw it as a great opportunity… [the fertiliser] is a very good animal health product, and the magnesium in the soil is really important for photosynthesis and it makes phosphate available as well to plants,” he says.

“When we bought it, we were doing 4000 tonnes [of fertiliser] a year, and now we're probably somewhere way over 25,000 tonnes.”

Merv is also a staunch advocate for natural nitrogen mixes as an alternative to chemical fertilisers.

“More sustainability into farming is what we’re driving for, we've got two farms operating here in Golden Bay which have not had nitrogen on them for like 17 years, and production from those farms just gets better for the animal health,” he says.

“It's going to be interesting because next it will be towards biochar or something like that as well, which will hold those nutrients in the soil for a much longer period and reduce costs.”

His other business interests include DX50, a Tākaka-based nationwide provider of water treatment chemicals, and Fernbrae Farm at Collingwood which is a sheep and beef farm set on biological farming systems.

Merv has also supported the Historic Transport Museum at Higgins Heritage Park, and Collingwood Volunteer Fire Brigade, and offers truck driving gateway programmes to Golden Bay High School students through Sollys.

He has also previously supported Golden Bay Lions Club projects like its fertiliser drives.

“I would like to thank all the people that have supported us to get this far because without good customers, you wouldn't have a business at all,” he says.

“My partner [of more than 40 years] Ann McNabb, she has been a great contributor to the success of Sollys and family members have also been really important to the company's development.

“I'm looking forward to February 2028, when Sollys will be 100 years old, there aren’t too many private family companies that get that far and stay together, so that makes you proud.”