About Curly's Ag
A small Queensland outfit that builds weed burners. Here's who you're actually dealing with.
I'm Curly. I build weed burners in a workshop in Queensland, and a fair bit of the time I'm the one who ends up on the other end of the phone when something goes wrong with one.
I didn't come out of agriculture. I started in roofing at twenty-three — long days, hot tin, and the kind of work that teaches you very quickly that a tool either does the job or it wastes your morning. That's never left me. If I'm honest about what I actually care about, it's efficiency: whatever you're doing, do it the way that doesn't waste your time. Everything on this website comes back to that.
The land came later. I wanted to grow our own food and not be so dependent on other people to eat, so we bought a place and got into it properly. And like everyone who does that, I found out how much of it turns out to be weeds — and how much of the gear sold to deal with them is rubbish.
Why the business exists
Curly's Ag started in 2017 under a different name, selling paper pot transplanters and small-scale growing gear to market gardeners. That equipment is still here and we still make it. But what took the business over was the weed burners, because that's what people kept ringing up about.
Most of the people who buy one would rather not spray. For some of them that's health, for some it's animals in the paddock, and for some it's simply not wanting to be the person who put chemical on their own ground. That's their call and it's a fair one. My job isn't to have an opinion about it — it's to make sure the alternative actually works, because a burner that runs out of puff on the second pass hasn't helped anybody.
How we build them
In our own workshop here in Queensland — cut, welded, assembled and tested by us. The handpiece comes from a supplier we've worked with for years overseas; everything around it, and the build, is ours. We keep the wear parts on the shelf in Australia, so when a hose or an igniter eventually goes, you replace the part and not the whole tool. That matters more than it sounds. Plenty of gear in this country is cheaper to throw out than to fix, and I think that's a rotten way to make things.
30-DAY WEED-FREE GUARANTEE + 5-YEAR WARRANTY
Use it on your own place for thirty days. If it doesn't clear weeds the way we said it would, ring us first — nine times out of ten it's a technique thing we can sort in five minutes. If we can't, you send it back and get your money back (you cover return postage). On top of that, five years against manufacturing defects. In the last two years we've had exactly one unit come back, and that turned out to be a how-to question rather than a fault. None of this replaces your rights under Australian Consumer Law.
Who you get on the phone
Cathy. Monday to Friday, nine to five, on +61 493 281 690. She's not a call centre and she's not a chatbot — if she doesn't know the answer she'll come and find out. And if you'd rather work out what you want before you ring anybody, the full price list is here.
The less flattering part
We're small, and that means when something goes wrong upstream you feel it. This September our handpieces got held up at the border. Rather than keep sending customers emails that said "any day now", I got on a plane, went to the supplier myself, and brought a hundred of them home as luggage.
I wouldn't hold that up as a supply chain. But it got people their gear, and I'd sooner do that than write another email that says nothing.
Need a tool that doesn't exist yet?
A good half of what we build started with somebody ringing up to ask whether we could make something. If you're stuck on a job, or you've got one of ours and you reckon it could be better, tell us. That's genuinely how this catalogue got written. Ring Cathy on +61 493 281 690, or email mail@curlysag.com.
That's about the size of it. Small outfit, we build decent gear, and we answer the phone.
— Curly