Unearthing the key to good soil

BY JON MORGAN

Chemical-free farming is the way to improve the nation's health, says an organic sheep and beef farmer.

Farming is like flying, organic  sheep and beef farmer Chris  Donovan says. "It's 90 per cent  planning to avoid the problems  that might lie ahead, and 10 per  cent sheer terror."

He ought to know. As a topdressing pilot, he has had a few "hairy" incidents and has mourned the deaths of many of his aviator friends.

As a farmer in the Koeke hills behind Taihape, he has put that experience to good use. He has cautiously felt his way towards fully fledged organic farming, but not without some frightening moments along the way.

Mr Donovan's first-hand encounters with the damage caused by farmers applying too much of the wrong fertiliser steered him towards organics. He has seen the devastation of oversupply on thin West Australian soils, in rich Indonesian vegetable plantations and on Waikato dairy pastures - and on his own farm.

He took over the family farm in the mid-1990s and began by continuing the conventional practice of fertilising and drenching.

"Luckily, I couldn't afford to topdress the whole farm. The superphosphate killed the soil flora and the worm population went to zilch. But where I didn't use super, the soil was fine."

The fertilised grass still grew but his stock performance hardly changed. Later, when he called in Waipawa consultant Peter Lester to analyse the soil and pasture, he discovered the grass lacked nutrients.

Now a committed BioGro-certified organic farmer, he describes such grass as junk food.

"We're giving our animals this junk food. Their meat is going into the food chain and people are not getting enough nutrients. They're eating but they're still hungry, hence the overweight problems plaguing our health system."

He feels that much of farming's high costs, low profits and poor animal health can be avoided by shunning chemical fertilisers and drenches and selecting the right animal genetics.

In the 1990s, the journey that led to this revelation was just beginning.

Mr Donovan talked with some of the old farmers in the district, who remembered when diseases such as internal parasites and flystrike were not a problem.

He delved into the writings of farmers and scientists of the 1950s and 60s, spending long hours in Victoria University's library reading dusty books that hadn't been opened in decades.

One farmer's experiences were particularly impressive. Brown Trotter, a South Canterbury sheep and beef farmer, pioneered the use of trace elements such as copper, magnesium, zinc, iodine and selenium, and reared prize-winning animals. Then, when he was diagnosed with heart disease, he cured himself by taking the same minerals.

Mr Donovan's explorations took him into the world of alternative farming systems that focus on improving the soil microbiology as a way to achieve nutrient-rich pastures and healthy stock.

He read books by Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, who advocated "do- nothing farming", a method based on reproducing natural conditions as closely as possible.

At the same time, he was seeing for himself the environmental damage caused by applying too much nitrogen.

He had begun his own topdressing business and saw, especially on dairy farms, collapsed soils and polluted waterways.

"The change in the pastures was most obvious from the air, and then when you landed, the stench of the sick land hit you. It was why drought hit the Waikato so hard last year - the soil's humus layer had been burnt off."

In desperation, farmers turned to what he terms "hillbilly witch potions". One so- called fertiliser he spread on to farms was worms wrapped in balls of solid effluent. Probitas, the silica-based soil conditioner developed by Bay of Plenty farmer Ewan Campbell, was also used.

Although Mr Campbell's claims about Probitas were found by a district court judge to be misleading and deceptive, Mr Donovan says the improved pastures and stock of those who used it were dramatically obvious to him. However, he considered it too expensive for him to use.

His farm became a laboratory, with different paddocks receiving experimental fertiliser blends. He found Hatuma Lime's dicalcic blend of superphosphate and lime a useful interim measure, and now applies reactive phosphate rock, lime and trace elements as shown to be needed by Mr Lester's soil analysis.

He has worked out his own method of improving the clover content of his pastures, letting the grass grow long so it is crushed by the sheep to add carbon to the soil, allowing the clover to flourish.

Pasture roots now go down more than 300 millimetres, with a proliferation of the mycorrhizal fungus that fixes atmospheric nitrogen. He has noticed an explosion in the worm population and whiter wool on dag-free sheep.

Parasites, energy-sapping wormlike creatures that live in an animal's gut, were tackled through improving his flock's genetics.

On the advice of scientist Clive Dalton, he took on the dirty job of counting the parasite eggs in his sheep's poo. Those with high counts were culled. He further boosted the flock's resistance by buying rams with low egg counts from Owhango breeder Melvin Forlong.

At the same time, he had his own genetic freaks to call on - two rams that had survived a year in the bush with their mother.

These undrenched lambs were healthy, though one had a high egg count, meaning it was resilient to the parasites, and the other had a low count, showing it was resistant. Both have passed these traits on to their progeny.

It's been 10 years since any of his ewes were drenched, and their lambs need just two or three drenches of organic cider vinegar.

He aims to sell his lambs on the shoulders of the season, when prices are high. This year they fetched $98 each at a store sale, a price any farmer would be happy with. But he says his profit was more than $56 a lamb, well above the $20-$25 of a conventional farmer because of his low costs - such as $2 a lamb for cider vinegar, compared with $40 for a chemical drench.

This is where he sees the future of the meat industry.

"Federated Farmers is calling for a $150 lamb to make farming profitable, but the same gains can be made by saving costs in drenching and fertiliser. It's about farming to the optimum, not the maximum.

"Meat & Wool New Zealand should be getting this message out; it would be a good use of its monitor farm programme."

Dairy farmers, too, should be encouraged by their industry to change, he says. He remembers from his topdressing days a dairy farmer talking of spending $58,000 a year on vet bills.

"He was putting on the nitrogen every few weeks, and it was just going straight through the soil. His animal health problems were related to his soil health, and he could have saved many thousands by cutting back his fertiliser usage. He wasn't the only one, and if you multiply his vet and fert spending across 12,000 farms, it must come to more than a billion dollars."

His lambing percentage after docking is around 120 per cent.

"I'm happy with that. I'm a one-man farm, and they're not costly to look after. That's enough to give me a good living."

With the marketing boost of BioGro certification, he hopes to lift his income, although he believes an organic premium is not feasible in the long term.

Finishing all his lambs is difficult, and his chances of linking with an organic finisher are slim - he is the only organic sheep farmer in the central North Island - but he is considering marketing his own meat or joining a South Island syndicate with a United States contract.

He has worked up two budgets. One, based on getting the full value of being organic, is based on returns of $7.05 a kilogram and would mean more than $120 a lamb. He won't reveal his profit from that, but says with a grin, "a QC in Auckland would have to work hard to get that kind of money".

The other is in case of disaster. It has the exchange rate at US93c, petrol at $2.43 a litre and lamb prices at $53. He thinks he could still keep his head above water.

The organic sheep farmer is in close touch with reality, he says. Soil tests determine the fertiliser usage that governs the health of soil, pasture and animal. Genetics decide the durability and performance of the flock.

Together, they result in a low-cost, easy-care lamb.

"That should be enough. Supermarket prices are getting dangerously high. Farmers who demand higher returns should take the weekly shopping list to the supermarket and see for themselves."

He did his own survey one Friday night.

"Out of 47 people, 40 were female and only seven were male. Three of them had a list, and the other four were pushing the trolley for their wives. I was the only one there deciding for myself.

"Farmers should get off the farm and find out just how much a leg of lamb costs and whether they can afford it.

"I came up behind an elderly woman shopping with her daughter. She wanted a rack of lamb but her daughter told her, 'They're $2 a chop, you can't afford it'. The look of disappointment on that woman's face was pitiful to see. This is what we're coming to."

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