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Throwalight onbiosolids

Changes to growing practices help

Family Farm Transform Black Soil To Pure White Cotton

Third-generation farmer Grant Porter knows the importance of previous knowledge. If something’s not broken, why try and fix it? But wearing his mechanical engineer hat, Grant is also continually pursuing improvement by using his skills to adapt farming operations to factor in changing variables like soaring input costs and the unusually wet seasons on his Brookstead farm for the past two years.

But farming wasn’t always part of Grant’s life plan.

“Farming inspired me to become an engineer because I’d grown up seeing my dad and uncle always fixing or changing things,” he says “It (fixing things) was part of life growing up, but engineering took me on a different trajectory.

“But when I was working in the resources industry, there was always one bone in me thinking about how we were ripping the earth apart and scarring the landscape to get coal, and that I was enabling this.

“I wasn’t really happy living in the city and where that and my career would take me.”

The fly in, fly out existence also didn’t bode well for the family he hoped to start with wife Elle.

These realisations coincided with Grant’s uncle, Glen, getting sick, and Grant going back to the farm to help out temporarily in 2018.

“My uncle passed away eight weeks after being diagnosed with cancer so it was a really tough time and I saw dad struggling and I could see an opportunity to apply my skills and what I’d learnt from the mines to save some expenses. I also wanted to do things which were good for the environment like I’d seen my dad and uncle do growing up.”

As Grant watches his three-yearold son, Jimmy, running in between rows of cotton plants nearly ready to harvest, he’s confident in his and Elle’s decision to build a life in agriculture, alongside his father, Brett, and brother, Mark, in their joint operation Porters Farming.

The Porters use the same agronomist as their neighbour Johannes Roellgen and while this means they share some practices like fertilising with cow manure, they also do many things differently because of the nature of the land they’re working and their business models.

More than 20 years ago, Grant’s father and uncle were in the first group in the area to apply biosolids on their farms

While the word biosolids can have negative connotations, it’s not quite what the average person thinks. A by-product of the sewage treatment process, biosolids are high in both nutrients and organic matter which improve soil health and consistency, and lead to improved plant health.

Grant says the response from the paddocks they first put biosolids on “opened up a can of worms”.

“Our soil tests were saying we have plenty of phosphorous and potassium but not enough nitrogen so all we needed to do was put urea on and we’d been following this blindly.

“But after putting the biosolids on we saw this huge difference: the plant’s trunk got bigger, yield went up and the cotton was this nice colour so we decided to try it on other blocks.

“It made us consider alternatives like cow manure, because even though the soil tests said our soil had enough potassium, we realised after we applied the manure that it didn’t because of the difference the manure made.

“We’d long battled diseases like Fusarium wilt and Vertasilium wilt, but after applying manure we noticed plant health improved and disease levels dropped.”

Fusarium wilt was first detected in cotton on the Darling Downs in 1993, with the soil-borne fungal pathogen causing extensive seedling loss early in the crop, especially in colder and wetter than normal conditions.

It can also kill the surviving plants later on. Extreme cases can render entire paddocks unsuitable for cotton growing.

As its name suggests, Verticillium wilt causes cotton plants to wilt and mottles leaves leading to necrosis and defoliation and similar to Fusarium, it can kill entire plants.

The Porters now apply manure to their cotton blocks when they pupae bust each year and are gradually applying biosolids across the entire farm.

The biosolids are applied and ploughed in twice over a four-year period, with Grant confident it will deliver enough phosphorous to benefit the soil for at least 50 years.

But as with anything, there’s drawbacks and he describes biosolids as a long-term project.

For one, it has to be your turn in line with the other farmers.

“Biosolids are very difficult to put on because your country needs to be dry and spent, because you’ve got a 30-plus tonne machine and trucks everywhere so the ground can’t be soft because of compaction and they need to be ploughed in as soon as they are spread so you need dry soil to incorporate it in.

“There’s a lot of things which need to line up magically and then if it rains, it’s off.

“If you do pull it off, there’s the smell. You definitely don’t want the wind blowing into your house the following few days!”

But the benefits very much outweigh the negatives.

“People don’t like the concept, but I think they’re probably unaware of how much compliance we undertake and how treated the biosolids are to ensure it’s fine to produce fibre from these paddocks.”

When it comes to water, Grant only irrigates cotton with all his other crops dryland.

“The business matrix e we operate off is highest gross margin per megalitre of water and that’s cotton,” he says.

“Every season we have ‘x’ amount of water available and it’s never as much as we’d like so we need to turn it into as many cotton bales as we can.

“Our cotton blocks are rested every second year to collect and retain moisture.

“We’re planting later than dad planted cotton and we’ve gone from prewatering and waiting 10 days, to planting and watering at the same time so the moisture carries us further.

“We flood irrigate because the paddocks are level and set up for it.

“There’s a significant cost to transition to lateral irrigators. If flood wasn’t working then you’d consider changing, but if it is, why would you change?”

Grant believes the average three waterings in crop makes this part of the Darling Downs area stand out in comparison to other regions where cotton is watered more than 10 times a season.

“We have a black clay soil which is self-mulching,” he says.

“It cracks when it’s dry so any fertiliser, manure or biosolids sink down into those cracks and when it rains, the soil swells up to cover them

GrantPorter wantshisson Jimmytohavethe sameopportunity ashimtogrow foodandcotton onthefamily farmat Brookstead; GrantandElle Portersaythey’re luckytobeableto raisetheirfamily onthefarm;Elle withdaughter Lily.Pictures: JacintaCummins so everything is incorporated. Our top soil goes down a metre and combined with moisture conservation tools like cover crops, stubble retention and ploughing practices, we are in an incredibly unique position.

“I want Jimmy to have the opportunity to farm here and it’s critical our water balance isn’t upset because it would be a huge loss in production if we can’t farm here.”

Grant is referring to the ongoing attempts to drill for coal seam gas, which opponents fear could cause subsidence and contamination to water sources.

“We’re really lucky in this location – where other people pay to cart manure hundreds of kilometres to fertilise their country, but we’ve got feedlots just down the road and our country produces incredible crops,” Grant says.

“This (farming) is as much our lifestyle as it is our livelihood and we need to protect this ability to produce food and fibre at all costs.”

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