Biological fertiliser benefits mixed farming tenfold

Mr Marshall of Nandowrie, 53km south of Springsure, operates a mixed organic farming enterprise of cattle, hay and grain.

As well as running 500 head of Angus/Limousin cross breeders, the family operation has 50 hectares of irrigated country of which 14 ha is organic lucerne; 700 ha of dryland organic crops and an organic background and finishing complex. Cattle production makes up half the business with hay and grain a quarter each.

Mr Marshall said they started transitioning to organics in 2015 and became fully accredited in 2017 because they no longer wanted to use chemicals and synthetic fertilisers.

"We attended a three-day workshop at Springsure run by Kim Cruse of Regen Ag where we gained pretty much a lot of our success in regards to making biological organic fertiliser," he said.

"A lot of the ingredients are in your own backyard or on your own farm, apart from a few others that you need to make it work."

Mr Marshall said the main objective of the biological fertiliser was to stimulate microbial life so there was a better cycling of nutrients within the plant and soil which was pretty much the key to success.

"Boosting microbial life and incorporating a rotation of cover crops allows a bank of plant available nutrients to build up in the soil for your following crop," he said.

The base of the biological fertiliser that Mr Marshall makes is a native microbe found in the bush land otherwise known as stubble digesting microbe.

He said the microbe was anaerobic - which meant it multiplied under an airlock with a feed of set amounts of skim milk powder and molasses - and digests any certified organic sulphate.

The liquid bio-fert is applied at 30 per cent concentrate at a rate of between 50-150 litres per hectare. It's applied either as a foliar spray or, during planting and after it's screened back to 200 microns, through a liquid injector that squirts it into a trench behind the seed, coating the seed before it's covered with soil.

Mr Marshall said he had been making the bio-fert for about five years and was one of the first in the Central Highlands area to start making it and having a field days to showcase what could be established.

"It is a bit labour intensive unless you put money aside to buy the equipment to make it easily which means you've got to buy brewing tanks and put in a nice concrete slab area with drainage because there's a lot of water involved with the making," he said.

"We spent a lot of money on infrastructure and actually cemented in a shed and put tanks in so everything in there is now set up so we can store about 50,000 lt of it whenever we brew it up now which is enough for us for half a year."

Mr Marshall said the advantage of bio-fert was in the diversity of plant and microbial life that they now had on the property.

He said the use of certified organic products such as the biological fertiliser with a rotational cover crop had helped maintain their cropping yields and productivity when they moved away from synthetic sulphates.

"Getting a cover crop back in the ground annually or at least once every third year, the benefits from that are tenfold I believe because the actual nutrients stored from growing that crop and then being available for the immediate next crop is unquestionable," he said.

"It's really hard to put a measure on what it's actually done to the soil, but you know it has done an awful amount when you see how good the following crop is.

"I think what I've been finding is just getting the diversity back in the soil using the covers is a huge benefit in regards to boosting the microbial life."

Mr Marshall said the cover crops could contain as many as 15 species of seed, but needed at least four families in the seed varieties to be planted because "they all talk to each other or have a symbiotic relationship where they exchange different sugars".

"We pre-select the species that are in the covers so we have the alternative of crimp rolling the pasture onto the deck to create a mulch layer to suppress weeds, or we graze cattle on it or cut it for hay - we have the ability to use that crop for three different options," he said.

"It just depends on what's required, we have a huge demand for organic certified hay so a lot of the times we are cutting it for that reason.

"The price for organic hay is at the high end of the conventional market and it's very stable. There's no ups or downs in the organic market. It's the same every year and you can really budget on what you're going to make out of your crop and producers buying the hay are super happy with the actual quality so they don't have any issues with paying a premium price for a good article."

Mr Marshall said there were a lot more people buying biological fertiliser from commercial producers and finding they were getting good results from its use.

"I think there is a space there starting to open up from people wanting to go away from synthetics because of the long-term disadvantages of being in the synthetic world for too long," he said.

"I've seen bio fert take off in the last two or three years because people are just looking for alternatives to get that nutrition back into their ground more naturally and want to use a more nutrient dense product - technically something that is full of synthetics doesn't yield as good and is less nutrient dense."

On July 18, a field day will be held at Mr Marshall's property, which will be hosted by Australian Organic Ltd and the UQ Drought Resilience Soils Project, and is open to all producers.

Guest speakers will include Kim Cruse of RegenAG and Grant Sims, Down Under Covers, Victoria, which is a major supplier of cover mixes in Australia.