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04/04/2023
Soil health, pasture health and herd health is all intrinsically intertwined on Brenden and Kait Ballon’s Queensland farm, with the visionary duo cleverly capitalising on the delicate balance of nature.
And at the heart of the cycle is an almost 1,000 tonne manure heap to be proud of.
Brenden and Kait own a third generation dairy operation at Maclagan in the Dalby region, running 150 Friesian and Jersey cows, plus 100 Speckled Park cross Angus steers and heifers.
They also manage pastures for grazing, and opportunity cash crops such as barley, wheat, millets and mung beans.
Since purchasing the property from his parents’ in 2020 Brenden has consistently spread raw manure from the dairy onto his paddocks, but it was an opportune purchase of a second hand front end articulated loader that has enabled him to now scale up into composting.
“Raw manure can have high salt content which is hard to break down, and is of little nutritional value for about 6-12 months, so we were always having to plan a couple of years ahead,” Brenden explains.
Without an articulated loader, he said the logistics of ‘turning’ manure – a vital composting process – was almost impossibly time consuming.
“I went to a clearing sale and expected to be paying nothing under $60,000, prices were going through the roof so I thought I was in for a bit of pain, but I ended up getting it for half that price – it was the steal of the century!”
A ‘steal’ made even more fortuitous considering the skyrocketing price of inputs over the past 18 months.
“My initial motivation for starting the manure pile was to improve soil health and add carbon back into the landscape, but with the increasing costs of fertiliser it’s certainly made good business sense over the past 12 months in particular.”
Leveraging natural nutrients to save on input costs
In April 2022, the first batch of compost was spread across paddocks a month before planting, encouraging a germination that utilised all the nutrients available in the biologically dense top soil.
“We follow a regenerative type model to capitalise on our manure,” Brenden explains. “The bacteria in a cow’s gut is what we want in the soil, increasing its microbiology through a ‘closed’ nutrient cycle.”
Dung beetles also play a critical role in returning nutrients to the soil, these tiny, tireless workhorses burrowing the dung, and its rich organic matter back into the soil.
The Ballons’ have eight species of dung beetles on their property, and while the majority of species are Summer and Autumn active, they’ve recently introduced a Winter/Spring species to ensure a year-round break down of dung.
The dung beetles break the manure, and its fresh cow gut bacteria, down into the soil – manure that would otherwise sit on the surface of soil, an untapped nutrient gold mine.
Dung beetle benefits also extend to animal welfare, with the manure breakdown reducing fly numbers.
“Buffalo fly is prevalent in dairy and very irritating to cattle. Stressed cattle lose productivity, so we work hard to ensure our herd is as comfortable as possible, and the dung beetles help us naturally manage flies.”
A long-held environmental vision, realised
Having had a keen interest in conservation farming since his teenage years, Brenden said the farm’s current path has been an evolving process.
“For years I was encouraging my parents into no-till farming and cell-grazing – with some degree of success,” he laughs.
“We’re at the foothills of the Bunya Mountains, and our soil is sloped and loamy and erodes easily, so the need to keep as much ground cover as possible to mitigate this erosion led us to regenerative agriculture.”
The Ballons’ grow multi-species fodder crops for grazing, silage, hay and cover crops as well as monospecies grain crops for opportunity cash cropping.
This year they experimented with a failed hay crop, “we decided not to try and make hay out of this crop due to it consistently raining so we left it to go through to grain”.
The multi-species crop which included barley, oats, wheat, vetch, forage canola and field peas, was harvested instead and while Brenden said the yield wasn’t huge being hay varieties, they were able to put it back through their dairy.
“In everything we do, we try and work on a circular model, with everything going into the soil, returned to the soil.”
“We also try to keep our food miles low by using neighbouring feedlot waste across our paddocks when we’ve exhausted our own – this adds nutrients with low food miles.”
Urea is still used if required, generally as an in-crop application rather than a pre-crop fertiliser, with the Ballons’ turning to mineral-based starters and pelletised poultry manure last season.
In 2023 the couple will add gypsum, lime, phosphate and other ‘goodies’ to the manure pile to further scale up their composting, and said so far much of their progression has been through trial and error.
“We’re very grateful to have been able to get advice from agronomist, David Hall, through a Dairy Australia project and we’ve watched a few of Dr Elaine Inghams videos as well as talking to many people who have been down this road before us.”
Diversification through Speckled Park Cross
While most dairies in the region use a dairy bull over their herd, with bull calves sold as veal, the Ballons’ opt for a Speckled Park bull in conjunction with an AI program.
“We really like the dairy beef crossed with the Speckled Park, it’s a cross that holds its beef well and we can fatten and sell to the works for added on-farm diversification of income.”
Their herd has also been integral in helping repair an eroding gully on the property, with the Ballons’ inspired by trail work done on the O’Sullivan family’s Bowen property in recent years.
“We had a two and a half metre deep gully that was eroding and struggled to grow soil cover, so we did a small amount of earthworks and then used our dairy herd to rejuvenate the soil using a biological carpeting technique.”
Biological carpeting is a method of healing the soil using cattle, stocked at a high density overnight for a number of nights, to create an inch of slurry across the soil.
This slurry – or biological carpet – contains minerals, nutrients and seed deposits from waste, urine and saliva that is massaged into the soil through cattle hoof movement.
Once a thick slurry has been achieved, the area is left to rest until the next rain event, when germination occurs.
“The resulting groundcover was inspiring and has mitigated any of our erosion worries, and our eyes are always open looking for opportunities to restore our landscape naturally.”
Continually looking to the future, next on Brenden’s wish list is a proper compost turner, which would allow him to speed up his composting and spreading process.
“I’d love to put the compost down deeper, about a foot down through a ripper for a deeper top-soil profile,” he said.
Regardless, their initial foray into recycling waste for fertiliser has already paid dividends – reducing the hefty outlay for inputs has increased the profitability of the Ballons’ milk per litre, and from a business perspective, Brenden said the outlook was good.
“Our hay sheds are full, our grain silos are full, our silage pits are full and we have a 1,000 tonne tower of natural fertiliser here on-farm, so we definitely can’t complain.”