Bill’s farm in South Taranaki has gone synthetic fertiliser free. Using a little Kiwi ingenuity, Bill came up with the idea of connecting a tap to his pond filling station which runs into a drum which containing seaweed and additives. It’s then mixed with the effluent so he can spread everything evenly and at the same time.
‘We’ve tried a few things over the years, but this seems to work well’
-Bill, Dairy Farmer, South Taranaki
Bill’s 250 cow farm uses a feedpad to collect the effluent, and a in-ground pond for storage. He says with his current set up it’s important to have a good stirrer. The secret is to stir regularly.
The effluent is stored in the pond during wet seasons until the ground is dry enough to use the tanker, with a Nevada Rainwave™ attached for spreading. The seaweed fertiliser is added to every load of effluent in the tanker. This saves an additional job of putting liquid fertiliser and soil conditioner onto the pasture separately.
‘Over the years we’ve used it, the cows are certainly a lot healthier….we did a blood test on 10 cows just to see that everything was ok. The only thing that was slightly down was selenium, but everything else was good. We just use a mineral to double the selenium.’
Now that the grass has grown a bit over Spring, Bill’s been able to reduce feeding to once a day.
‘This is our first Spring with the pad and it worked out well. Good to see no waste.’
If you’d like to find out more about how you could be like Bill and eliminate your use of synthetic fertilisers, call us on 1800 963 490 or send us a message on Facebook!
