Case Studies

Nutrient Management and Environmental Compliance

Nutrient Management has quickly become the latest farming buzz term, with almost all regional councils currently having in place or implementing ‘Regional Plans’ aimed at setting standards for nitrate leaching and phosphate runoff.

These standards will affect future land use and farming intensification options or require changes to your current farming system.

Meeting these proposed standards will most likely require farmers to prepare a Farm Environment Plan (FEP), Sustainable Milk Plan® or Nutrient Management Plan (NMP). They aim to identify and minimise the loss of nutrients from your production system.

Typically, these plans cover categories such as fertiliser management, effluent management, irrigation management and riparian or wetland management.

We can help farmers with:

Establishing historic N loss baseline
Farm Environment Plans and Nutrient Management Plans
Scenario modelling for resource consents and land use change applications
Annual OVERSEER® Nutrient Budget

Abron soil nutrition consultants are qualified in the use of OVERSEER® and are able to discuss Farm Environment Plan options in your region.

Waikato dairy farmers Peter and Mandy Paterson have been on an Abron Soil Nutrition Programme for eight years.

Over this time production has improved from 70,000kg milk solids to 104,000kg milk solids on 79 hectares from 215 cows. Pasture harvested by cows has increased from 10.4T/ ha to 13.1T/ha, an increase of 2.7T/ha. This has been achieved with less than 30 kg/ ha/yr of applied nitrogen and an OVERSEER® nitrogen loss to water of 23kg/ha/ yr. An example that through an Abron fertiliser programme promoting good soil health you can have high farm productivity while looking after the environment and meeting environmental regulations.

Hawkes Bay sheep and beef farmer Andrew Russell, Tuna Nui Station, started with Abron five years ago and has reported significant positive changes:

“For starters, our input costs have dropped dramatically. We completely stopped applying nitrogen four years ago and there has been no negative change to pasture growth – we know this as we monitor closely using FARMAX on a monthly basis.”

“Working root depth has increased from 150mm to over 300mm” says Andrew. Worm numbers have increased to over 20 per spade square and there is much more biological activity. A more balanced pasture quality has also helped contribute to lambs being finished much earlier, which has had obvious positive effects on the business.

You can’t monitor what you don’t measure!

Monitoring is the key to measuring changes in the soil’s physical properties and the health of your soil

Abron doesn’t just make fertiliser recommendations based on a soil test- we take a closer look at what’s happening underneath the pasture. The visual soil assessment (VSA) was developed by Graham Shepherd of BioAgriNomics and is a scientifically proven, repeatable method developed for New Zealand soils.

We use the VSA to assess and monitor soil quality and pasture and crop performance. The assessment gives a 0-2 score for 28 different aspects of your soil and plants. We carry out VSA’s twice a year, in spring and in autumn, when weather conditions are favourable – i.e not too wet and not too dry. We record these on a scorecard and look for long-term trends over 3-5 years.

We dig a 200mm cube of topsoil and assess:

Soil texture and structure
Rooting depth
Earthworm numbers
Clover % and health of the clover nodules
Soil smell
Thatch
Pasture colour relative to fertility spots

Some of the things we measure are:

Brix of the pasture using a refractometer
Nitrate levels in the pasture or crop using a sap meter
Soil compaction using a penetrometer
Length and density of roots

Case Study:
Southland Dairy Farm

Before Abron:

Tight blocky soil
Roots restricted to top 100mm
Poor porosity
Low worm numbers
Poor pasture growth

2012

Improvements:

Finer nutty crumb structure is developing
Improved drainage and porosity
Increased worm numbers from 5-10/spade square to 18-24/spade square
Increase rooting depth from 100mm to beyond 250mm
Increased pasture growth – the farmer no longer has to miss the paddock every few rounds from lack of growth

What we’ve measured in 2014

The Southland dairy farmer has been on an Abron fertiliser programme for two years.