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by Geoff Mercer & filed under News, Rural.
REBUILDING: Crop farmer Phil Brogden with a handful of the vermicast from Kawerau company Ecocast he credits with rebuilding his soils. Photo Geoff Mercer C9307-26
AGRICULTURAL contractor and crop farmer Phil Brogden swears by the composting and vermicasting products he applies to his soils.
Mr Brogden said over many years he had observed maize yields falling and the once-fertile Rangitaiki Plains soils deteriorating.
Farmers who had grown maize for 30 years were finding their soils had lost their structure.
Where seagulls once swarmed behind tractors ploughing fields to feed on worms, today there was no point – where maize had been grown repeatedly for years, the worms were gone.
Chemical and mineral fertilisers applied to boost production had killed them off.
There was no more readily available land for farming so it was time to build up and repair soil already in use but slowly dying.
“We have to rebalance them to fire up production again,” Mr Brogden said.
After four years of applying 20 tonnes of vermicast – the product of worms digesting organic matter – to the hectare on to his own paddocks “the soil structure is once more hanging together and I have worms in the soil again”, he said.
“Interest in this is increasing.”
He obtains his vermicast from Kawerau business Ecocast, which composts greenwaste and vermicasts organic waste products such as wood fibre, bio-solids and waste fruit.
Mr Brogden said many more farmers were beginning to realise that continual application of imported fertilisers and “salts” was killing their soil organisms.
“We have to change the mindset,” he said.
It was difficult, though, because while many older farmers had witnessed the progressive harm modern fertiliser regimes could cause, and were willing to return to older, less destructive practices, their younger counterparts knew no different.
Younger farmers were often under much greater financial pressure and the easy way to deal with that, in the short-term, was to invest in chemical, quick-response fertilisers.
While the response produced quick financial advantage, it came at the expense of the soil’s long-term health, Mr Brogden said.