The first of its kind in East Gippsland, last week’s Soil Symposium at the Gippsland Agricultural Centre, drew more than 100 people who gathered to learn and share ideas.
When welcoming the audience, Gippsland Ag Group’s (GAgG) general manager, said they were calling all minds and soil methods to the table, from Albrecht to biological, precision to regeneration and conventional.
“It’s not a battle of beliefs,” Ms Smith said.
“It’s bridging them all and taking the best of everything.”
She challenged participants to stay curious, to ‘park’ the things that challenged them and come back to them later.
“We’re not chasing the perfection, we’re chasing the right answer,” she said.
Among many soil tidbits, Sulphur and its importance to the soil utilising Nitrogen efficiently was a key learning point, covered in different ways by speakers like AgVic’s Fiona Baker, GAgG CEO Trevor Caithness and Peter Norwood, Full Circle Nutrition.
Ms Baker also said Phosphorous was important for legume nodulation and Nitrogen fixation.
“Soils will naturally over time drop back to their native state if we don’t replace what we’re taking out,” she said.
“We need to feed them.”
She said the key message was to soil test, to be able to work out what was happening.
“It’s cheaper to maintain fertility levels than pick them up from a drop.”
Peter Ronalds, a familiar face across the district from his soil coring work, now the
Sustainable Agriculture Manager for the Western Port Catchment Landcare Network, spoke about soil carbon, which increased water holding capacity.
“One tonne of soil carbon equals 3.67t of carbon di oxide taken out of the atmosphere,” Mr Ronalds said.
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“Think of it like hay in the shed – if you’ve sold it, it’s not your anymore.”
He encouraged people to check the SRO Soils website for information on soil carbon projects.
“It’s very easy to lose and a lot harder to build soil carbon, forget the dollars, you need soil carbon regardless.”
Newry dairy farmers, Kate Mirams and Peter Neaves, spoke on their regenerative journey, showing photos of their multi-species crops, the project they had undertaken comparing conventional and regenerative methods, as well as their figures.
They have worked with soil scientist people like Nicole Masters and Joel Williams and have reduced their use of urea, moving to liquid nitrogen applications over granular and aiming to stimulate the soil biology.
In their sixth year of their project they have started to brew microbes for a foliar/soil ‘drench’ that costs just $1 a litre and they have found their regen paddocks are holding twice as much water as the conventional paddocks.
GAgG CEO Trevor Caithness encouraged the audience to take the time to understand their soil tests, and be able to work out the basics.
Mr Caithness is a William Albrecht follower who believed in correcting the soil to feed the plants that humans eat.
“We put calcium on our soil because soil needs calcium, not for pH reasons,” Mr Caithness said.
Full Circle Nutrition’s Peter Norwood spoke about soil being the most expensive thing farmers owned.
“The way we make money is in how well our plants and animals respond,” Mr Norwood said.
“Sulphur is such an important element, it protects plants against bacterial and fungicidal infection, it’s vital for protein synthesis and plant metabolism.
So much knowledge, research and practical experience was communicated at the soil symposium, with many questions from the audience addressed immediately.
Ms Smith said the message was clear, know your soil, take the best of all soil management approaches and tailor your practices for productivity and resilience.
