Further to my recent article on how rising food prices will be good news for rural communities all over the world, The Land newspaper has carried an interesting report on how rising energy and fertiliser costs (Nitrogen is now $1000/tonne) have restored and reinforced the economics of growing nitrogen fixing cover crops in fallow rotation.
Cotton farmers routinely add 200kg of nitrogen/ hectare but the growing and ploughing-in of Vetch in rotation has been found to add 140kg in a more balanced application that is safer for the following cotton crop in dry times. It substantially reduces cash outflows, leaving the synthetic form of this fertiliser as an ‘opportunity outlay’ to boost production in a good year. It seems the humble Fava Bean is almost as good for this purpose, with the advantage of producing a cash crop as well.
The implications of this, not just for farmers in less developed nations, is that they have the means to boost production in response to higher world food prices without placing additional demands on world oil/fertiliser supplies. In poorer countries the input cost is no more than the price of seeds and the farm family’s own labour.
Regards
Ian Mott
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Ian,
I used to plant and plough-in Poona Pea by horse and it cost very little except effort.
If graziers let the native wattle grow instead of slashing them for improved pasture it would help in many ways too [as well as fix nitrogen].
I was once advised by the NSW DPI that I could not sow clover in our banana patch because the law regarded it as a weed that had to be removed. Prior to this my father advised that he once tried cow peas on the irrigated patch and the damned stuff completely crowned out the lot.
It seems the new method of choice in orchard crops, especially those in fruit fly areas is to graze pigs on the waste fruit on the ground. This does two things;
1 it gets rid of all the rotting fruit that supports the fruit fly, and
2 boosts soil phosphorous levels as pigs cannot digest it and their manure is very rich in it. This is at the milder doses that the plants and soil can handle while pure pig $hit from a piggery is too strong.
And as the pigs congregate where the fruit is, they deposit the fertiliser where it is needed most.
Get the processes right, save energy, increase efficiency.
Point those pigs in the right direction and they’re a bonus. Life’s a breeze.
Most people, sadly, wouldn’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Ian.
I guess so, spangled one. They’re too engrossed in planet salvation to be concerned by mere detail. The reason they concentrate on the so-called “big picture” is because if you add more than two variables they spin out. Even their damned cabinet submissions are limited to three dot points so if your situation is more complex than that they will just leave something out and hope all goes well.
Hay Drongo, wattles are a good pioneer tree but they have their problems.
I’m not sure where you are talking about, but you want to go easy on them in areas like the Burnett.
They get too thick very quickly, then they suck every bit of moisture out of the soil, & even start killing each other.
Then, if you get a fire through, you’ll get such thick regrowth, that only plowing, & sewing to pasture will get enough grass to feed a wallaby to 10 acres.
I like to use trees as nutrient pumps, drawing nutrients from too deep for grass, & then spreading them back on top, for the grass to draw on. But you want things that rot down quickly, not mulch the place.
You also want something that inhibits its own seedlings, or you have too much work controlling them, before they get big enough for you to loose control to the greenies.
That’s true Hasbeen, I’ve had them take over like that after a big fire. With a cool burn it doesn’t happen so much.
In light sandy country wattles in moderation seem to improve pasture and of course the hard-to-spot little birds thrive on them.
So you guys do know some stuff after all. hmmmmm
Dunno nuthin’!
But I did get kicked off Deltoid yesterday for suggesting that Kirrabati wasn’t sinking, just running out of deck chairs.
High oil and fertilizer prices help the local and regional economies at the expense of the global economy. Don’t like the high world commodity price of food? Grow food locally. Don’t like the high world commodity price of fertilizer. Use local options like nitrogen fixers, animal manure, and composting solutions.
How about developing our own fertilizer producing capacity? At the moment here in Western Australia you cannot buy nitrogen fertilizer and the winter crop has just been sown. CSBP has its ammonia plant idle in Kwinana due to the current gas crisis. The Burrup Plant is also offline.
Australia is rich is gas and coal (Metex looking to manufacture nitrogen fertilizer from UCG) yet we rely on overseas suppliers for a good percentage of our nitrogen needs. We are rich in rock phosphate in the NT and Qlds Georgina BAsin yet we currently import 50% of our phosphate needs from Morocco and China (although they have now banned phosphatic fertilizer exports). We have potential to develop potash capacity in the Pilbara in WA from sedimentary lake deposits yet we are 100% import dependent.
Alternatively we could begin to seriously focus on production systems that require low levels of inputs in the first place yet still remain food commodity productive.
Now with hyperinflating oil/gas and coal prices we are going to see a whole world of biomass to energy projects come on stream. So the prospects for profitable perennial based agricultural systems has never looked brighter. The main problem is there is a very limited knowledge base in to how to commercialise some of these systems which is unfortunate. Whatever the future of farming in Australia looks like it will need to be perennially based, low input requiring and yet still be food and where possible fibre productive. Of course any perennial based systems is generally amenable to some sort of grazing option and this is where animals need to be integrated.
A few years back there was a fairly costly, publicly subsidised, failure of a sugar processors co-generation project. The plan was to use sugar cane waste and wood waste as feed stock to a power plant. A large part of that failure was due to the scale of the waste disposal problem presented by huge volumes of ash.
This was compounded by supply chain surges and resulting storage issues presented by wood supplied from governement approved development sites which delivered very large volumes of feedstock over short periods.
The greens had been instrumental in ensuring that thinnings and harvest waste from private and public native forests were excluded from the project even though this source offered a stable supply of feedstock on a low cost, just-in-time basis.
And this proved to be the critical flaw in the whole exercise. For farmers and forest owners have another name for ash. They call it potassium. They also recognise potassium as one of the key fertiliser elements in NPK.
And if they had been seriously consulted at any time in the planning process they could have advised that potassium, in the form of ash beds, has been recorded to boost tree growth by up to six times that of trees outside the ash beds.
They could also have been advised that improvements in soil nutrient levels flows directly into the nutrient levels of the trees leaves, buds, bark and sap and thereby boosts the carrying capacity of dependent wildlife.
And if they had been consulted at any time of the planning process they could have advised that this costly pile of ash also had a value. They could have been advised that a just-in-time delivery of forest thinnings would enable the economical back-loading (or pre-loading) of this ash to the same forest where it could be spread under the retained trees to boost their growth and to increase their rate of carbon sequestration.
But they didn’t consult with forest owners at any stage of the project. They accepted green bull$hit as the full extent of knowledge relating to such a project. And both the government and the now barely viable sugar mill got the dismal $20 million plus failure they so richly deserved.
What the, aptly named, patients on the hospital waiting lists might have done with the $20 million is another story. But some of them are probably dead by now anyway.
But thats life (and death) and governance in the brave new green utopia.
Interesting case Motty. I bet all the officials involved have deleted the whole exercise from their CVs by now.