A significant fertiliser breakthrough?
Former ACT MP and Federated Farmers president Owen Jennings believes he's come across a new fertilising method in Australia that yields "outstanding results".
A man who bought an opencast Southland lignite mine 18 years ago no longer sells the coal for fuel, but sings its praises as stock food, fertiliser and soil conditioner.
Malcolm Sinclair’s Southern Humates company quarries and powders lignite into products known as humates – including a stock feed and straight humate used as fertiliser. It also provides raw material to other suppliers, such as human dietary supplements.
Lignite is a soft brown coal, produced by compression of organic matter, but is geologically young and regarded as half-way between peat and hard coal.
That means it remains high in biologically-active humic and fulvic acids – although its low heat and high carbon dioxide output when burnt make it no longer welcome as fuel.
Sinclair has been producing humates for seven years.
Speaking on his stand at the Southern Field Days at Waimumu, he explained that soils ideally have a 50:50 balance of fungi and bacteria. But Sinclair says fungi levels are naturally low in New Zealand soils and further depressed by farming methods of added phosphates and nitrates.
“The humic acid feeds the fungi and brings them back,” he told Rural News.
Although humate use remains controversial in some quarters, it has wide acceptance in organic, regenerative and biological farming.
Southern Humates is BioGro organically-certified and sells from Whangarei to the Bluff, he says.
Sinclair says humates give the soil the ability to hold on to nutrients by a process known as chelation.
Sinclair says that as a stock feed, humate promotes bacteria in the gut, to sort out spring scours by restoring the breakdown of the mucous lining.
He says the animals regulate their own dosage depending on their needs.
“We just feed it ad-lib. One day they’ll eat a lot, next day they won’t eat a lot at all.
“Animals are like that - sheep eat soil to get the nutrients and minerals out of it.”
Analysis by Dunedin-based Techion New Zealand shows the cost of undetected drench resistance in sheep has exploded to an estimated $98 million a year.
Shipping disruption caused by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea has so far not impacted fertiliser prices or supply on farm.
The opportunity to spend more time on farm while providing a dedicated service for shareholders attracted new environmental manager Ben Howden to work for Waimakariri Irrigation Limited (WIL).
Federated Farmers claims that the Otago Regional Council is charging ahead unnecessarily with piling more regulation on rural communities.
Dairy sheep and goat farmers are being told to reduce milk supply as processors face a slump in global demand for their products.
OPINION: We have good friends from way back who had lived in one of our major cities for many years.