I'll be happy when ....

I'll be happy when the pastures in all my paddocks are performing like Paddock 11.  Here is a photo of (admittedly) the best part of it - taken in mid August.

Riku is actually about 6 ft 3 in - so this amount of growth at the end of winter is ... amazing.

This is one of my Phalaris paddocks - which seem to do better than my ryegrass paddocks.  I also gave the whole paddock an application of compost and chicken manure in late December.

The next photo show a close up of the grazing boundary.  The right is where the cattle were yesterday.  To the left is the new area.  In the bottom right corner is .... my finger.

The cattle have now moved to 12 - and the part of 11 that was grazed about 3 weeks ago is already coming back strongly.

I have thought about putting all of my pasture across to a Phalaris mix, but my advice is that I'm better with some ryegrass dominant paddocks - as they will grow at different times.  It seems to me that the Phalaris grows all year - and the ryegrass mainly in Spring and Autumn.

We just had our first calf of the year this afternoon.  It's the first calf from a new Dun bull.  The Black mother has dropped a Dun calf.  I was given to believe that the Black is dominant and not to expect too many Dun calves - but from a sample of one - 100% Dun.

Creating pastures

S

Ever since I used conventional mechanised means to kick start the transition to  high productivity pastures at Moora, I have wondered whether I might have been able to do it without the contractor's 200 HP John Deere, disc plough, and other implements.

But, at the time, I hadn't read Peter Andrews or Joel Salatin - and I hate gorse - of which we had plenty.  So I got the most of the place mulched and then burnt before cultivation, lime, 2 years of fodder crops and re-cultivation (to break the weed cycle) ... before planting to a mix of just a couple of pasture species - plus clovers.

I think Moora pastures are now pretty good, but I'm actively looking to increase the range of species in the pasture sward with hand oversowing - and also just seeing what volunteers (and performs) under the cell grazing regime we now operate to.  After reading Peter Andrews, in particular, I can never look at a 'weed' the same way again.

Leasing another farm nearby has given me an opportunity to try a different approach to improving pasture.  We are fortunate enough to have the new farm - of about 60 acres - on a long term basis.  So I can afford to put some effort into building its productivity - knowing we will reap the benefit for as many years as I am likely to want to continue farming.

When we took over there was one reasonable quality 10 acre paddock - where we were already grazing stock.  The farm included 4 more small paddocks (another 8 acres) and a big area (40 acres) with little grass and a lot of hungry kangaroos in residence.  This area had been fenced, but at some stage this had fallen into disrepair.  My first thought was to just lease the fenced paddocks, but this was not attractive to the owner.  In the end I took on the big paddock as well.

When it started raining again in winter of 2010 the response in that big paddock was pretty impressive - and a bit unexpected.  By the end of that summer, I was in charge and it was necessary too slash the huge quantity of grass and weeds.  It took a contractor several days to grind his way through it all and the mulched grass lay thick on the ground.

During the winter I had an electric fence built to separate my area off from the part of the property I'm not leasing.  It's a 4 wire fence - 2 of them electrified.  Various pundits predicted the kangaroos would destroy the fence, but it hasn't happened in the 6 months it has been there.  Perhaps because of plenty of feed in the bush - or the long grass - we seem to have far fewer kangaroos.  Long may it continue.

We've had another good year and the grass (with fewer weeds this time) was well over a metre deep across most of the big paddock by late Spring.  My holiday job has been to create an electric fenced sub-divsion - and to start the process of cattle led pasture improvement.  I have a mob of 19 steers on it and they are working their way through it.

In the spring they were getting about a 1/6th of an acre a day.  With the deteriorating quality of the pasture now, I'm giving them about 1/4 of an acre.  There is a lot of Phalaris and it's long and has seeded.  They are trampling a fair bit of it now, but look well and seem to be gaining weight.

I've now finished feeding 2 of the 7 paddocks that the fencing has created.  I'll keep two of these as 'set stocking' rest areas.  The other 5 -  I'm going to really try to improve pasture productivity.  The first of these, I finished feeding at the end of November.  It is now greening up and coming back nicely.

The second paddock was very long and rank before the steers went in - and had more weeds.  When they finished, I decided to use my big zero turn mower to slash the residual.  The first photo shows slashed and unslashed areas side by side.

 The second photo shows the southern half of the paddock after I finished - and the last one the northern half.

The slashing creates more organic material to go with the mulched pasture from last year.  It also knocks down the weeds - a mix of dock, thistles, wire weed and another woody thing that the cattle seem to strip bare.  They don't touch the dock, thistles or wire weed.  We do a certain amount of grubbing, but mainly we're going to use the Peter Andrew's approach and see what happens with cell grazing and a bit of natural fertility enhancement.

Mowing it gives me a good look at the paddock - where grass is growing well - and where it's thinner.  This, and the fencing, tells me that I've got quite a bit of really productive land - at least when it rains.  Not all of it is good - but I think the poor spots are probably only about 15% of the 40 acres.  The rest looks as though it's as good as (or better than)  the best of Moora.

When I finished it this evening it looked pretty good.  I'm thinking of getting a really big lot of the chicken manure and rice hulls that I've been using at Moora and using my manure spreader to put that out.  It has made a big difference at Moora - where I've spread it.  I just got 22 m3 a few days ago - and most of that will go onto 43 this weekend.  The rest will be used to turbo charge the compost heaps.
F

Cold and wet

S
I suppose at the end of July things should be cold and wet.  While we were away the cattle stayed on pasture, but I have put them into the feed yard since and have been feeding them hay.

This keeps them off the paddocks when they are at their wettest.  It will also use up some 2009 hay that I have left.  It also produces a bit of waste hay mixed with manure to turbo charge our compost.  This year we got access to some rain damaged hay from a neighbour.  We've now picked up most of it and put it straight into the compost bins.  By the time we're finished we'll have at least 4 compost containers - each 6 metres in diameter and about a metre deep once the material composts.

That is about 120 cubic metres of compost.  I'll add that to a similar quantity of chicken manure and rice hulls and put it out on my paddocks.  Actually 250 cubic metres will cover nearly half this farm!  This last year I did about 15 to 20%, but only the first 5% with compost.  From what I read and understand the compost mix should definitely be better than just the 'chicken & rice'.

Nothing much is growing at the moment - other, hopefully, than calves in cows.  It won't take long though and Spring will be here.  Last year growth didn't seem to take off until late September.  I can't wait to see how this year goes.
F

Is it Australia? Or New Zealand?

This is the view west across paddock 44 at the end of an Australian summer.  We cut hay just on 2 months ago.  Then I spread perhaps 30 tonne of chook manure and compost.  

St 

[Double click for full screen view]

At this time of year we would usually be brown and dry, dry, dry.  This year we're green, green, green - and not that wet really.  I guess we've had 300 mm over the 3 months of summer - some of it was pretty heavy, but spread out like New Zealand - a week or 2 or 3 apart.

I'm thinking of mulch mowing at least one of the paddocks and leaving it on the paddock - just to see the effect of an on site composting.  I'm also doing this at a leased property where there is long rank grass over quite a large area that, 12 months ago, was bare to the point of quite serious erosion risk.  This happens when there are too many kangaroos coming out of the bush.

Sixteen cows and their calves have now had their time at Moora Farm with the bull and returned to their homes for most of the year - on other farms nearby.  As a result I have only 14 animals at Moora Farm - and there is no way they can keep up with growth.  I have the 2009 calves at another agistment property.  I'll get them home soon - and that will help.

Anyone reading this in the Gisborne area (Macedon Ranges really) who is interested in agisting cattle for us - please get in touch.  We have a variety of ways it can work.  The main thing is that you can get to look after some beautiful cattle - but with a good support structure if you're a beginner - or just not having to worry about things if you're more experienced.

The cattle are Belted Galloways and have what my dear wife calls 'high paddock appeal'.  Just this morning I picked up the start of a new agistment option - another animal with high paddock appeal as it turns out - see the next blog post.

F

The effect of spreading compost

S

To the left I have spread a 50:50 shandy of Moora Farm compost and chicken manure and rice hulls.  To the right I have just paddock harrowed what the cattle left.  

I have enough compost and chicken manure to do another couple of acres.  I'm saving it for one of the 2 paddocks I'm going to cut hay from. 

Spreading compost

S
Last week I got 60 m3 of poultry manure and rice hulls being removed from a shed near Riddells Creek.  That has allowed me to 'shandy' this high nitrogen, but natural fertiliser with the approximately 60 m3 of compost I made this year - for spreading onto my paddocks.

The process goes like this:  put a front end loader bucket of chicken manure in my H&S manure spreader - as shown in photo 1.

You can see part of one of 2 huge piles of chicken manure to the right.

Then: add a bucket load of my compost - as in photo 2.

I started out with a similarly huge pile of compost.  It's mainly made from the waste hay and cow manure we clean out of the Feed Yard.  But everything else I can get that is compostable also goes in.

To the left of photo 1 is the stack of urban green waste.  We're in the process of working out whether the effort required to remove non-compostable garbage is worthwhile.

Then:  drive to the paddock where you want to spread the material.  Then engage the ground drive - as you can see me doing in photo 3.

The ground drive works from the wheels of the manure spreader.  It makes the beater you can see to the right spin around - and, at the same time, an apron in the bottom of the spreader drags the material back onto the beater blades.

I'm pulling the spreader with a Polaris  Ranger with a 700 cc engine - which is about the minimum it needs.  Using the Ranger rather than the tractor is quicker for me - and reduces the weight of the traffic on the pasture.

The paddock I'm spreading onto was cell grazed about 3 weeks ago.  Cell grazing is a process where the cows get a measured amount of pasture each day - before moving onto a fresh piece of pasture the following day.

It results in much better utilisation of pasture - and faster re-growth.  When done well it can result in 2, 3 or 4 times the pasture production of the traditional set stocking system.

It is made possible by single wire electric fencing. I have this paddock divided into 4 strips that allow the cattle to get back to the trough - and to some shade. 

If I was following absolute best practise,  I would have a backing wire that keeps them off yesterday's area - and provide some sort of movable water system.  I'm still thinking about how to do this.

The final photo shows the spreader spreading.  I simply put it in low gear and drive along at walking speed until, after 120 or 130 metres it starts throwing the last of the load up into the air - and, if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, back onto me.

The spreader has a capacity of 80 cubic feet.  This tells you where it comes from ... the only place that doesn't use the metric system.  In any case, that is 2.25 cubic metres - and I estimate that it covers around 500 square metres.  So, following this, I will put out 50 cubic metres per hectare.

It's going to take me a while to cover the farm, but that is the aim.
F

New compost excitment

S
During the last week, as well as a lot of rain, we've finished off the compost yard by adding B grade crushed rock to the handling area.  All that remains now is to get more galvanised mesh for additional compost containers - and get some extra compostable material.

We made a start on the second task on Friday evening when we got a load of green waste from a guy who runs a green waste collection service in our area.  Normally he would take it to the municipal tip and dump it - at a cost of $170.

His first reaction when I said I would be interested was that there would be 'too much crap in it'.  As we discussed it, he decided that this would indeed be the case from one part of his route, but that perhaps the more civilised customers (in Woodend for example) could be trusted not to put things in their green waste bag that they shouldn't.

I didn't ask whether this lot came from civilised Woodenders, but there certainly is some stuff that can't be composted.  We have been left a number of woolpacks to re-pack the stuff that will have to go to the tip.  We've just got to work out how long this process is going to take - and compare that to the value of the fertility we add via an increased compost supply.

Early last week we went to a 2 day seminar with Joel Salatin of Omnivore's Dilemma and Food Inc fame.  I've now seen him in person twice - and he is as good as in print.  There is an intelligence and intellectual honesty about the man that is really special.  Compost is a critical part of his farming system.  It's not where I got it from though.

I remember two things as sources of my interest:

• my Dad's use of a deep litter system for housing pigs in the 1960s; and
• reading about the role of compost in gardening from the Yates Garden Guide that my Mum gave me shortly after I got married.

I wish I could ask my Dad how he put together his pig raising system - because I think it would be one that Salatin would approve of.  I remember bits of it (the bits I helped with) - and not others - and, sadly perhaps, Dad is not around to ask any more.

Much of my energy policy work at present is around carbon pricing and the ways in which the electricity and gas systems can be de-carbonised.  I have to confess that I probably don't make enough noise about the capacity of composting and the sort of farming we're trying to do to make a difference.

My excuse is that I work at the implementation end of things where the big policy choices have been made and governments (or businesses) need someone to help them 'do it'.  I won't work for policy choices I think to be wrong, but experience tells me good, common sense implementation can make all sorts of things work - or work better.  And policy almost always turns out to be wrong ... in retrospect.
F

Using what you have

S
I'm a fan of re-using things.  Perhaps not as much as some (like my wife), but a fan nonetheless.  Re-use or continued use of something old is actually much more 'green' and 'sustainable' than many things that are promoted as such.

I have a three examples:

My tractor
It's a 1992 John Deere 2250.  I bought it after it had already a very hard life working for a Western District Shire and a Kilmore contractor.  I spent $10,000 adding a new front end loader and got it back to John Deere green - instead of Shire yellow.
It's now in a condition where, if looked after properly, it should last forever.  I use it for what a real farmer might think of as 'tractor work' rarely, but I use it to substitute for muscle all the time.  Yesterday I used it to shift some timber on a pallet, move a rock bigger than I could lift, scrape up some dirt  and move it.  The first job needed bale forks, the last 2 needed the bucket.  No problem - everything done in half an hour including the bale fork / bucket changeover.  If I had to do it with hand tools, it would have taken at least a couple of hours - and I'd still be thinking about how to shift a 400 kg rock.  I might have used a quarter of a litre of diesel.
If I spent $50,000, I could have a new tractor and loader with the same capability - plus a few bells and whistles of questionable utility.  Why?

My car
My car is a 2002 Statesman.  It's now done a bit over 150,000 km - and I have no plans to replace it.  I bought it about 4 years ago with about 70,000 on the clock.  It was 'cheap' because it was a V8 and petrol had just spiked.  It suits me for a number of reasons.  First and most importantly ... I fit in it comfortably.  Then ... the V8 lets me tow big loads occasionally.  Then ... the 'inefficiency' of the 11 litres / 100 km fuel consumption is more than offset by the avoided cost of constructing a new, more efficient replacement.
If I spent $50,000 to $100,000, I could have a new car with the same capability - plus a few bells and whistles of questionable utility.  Why?

The Compost Yard
The construction of the handling area  of the compost yard has seen the re-use of a variety of materials including:

• fence posts from an old set of cattle yards;
• some sleepers left over from another project;
• some sleepers recovered from a railway line somewhere;
• some rocks sourced from where all the other rocks come from - one thing we don't lack is rocks!
• timber for the rails from a whole variety of sources - stored away under the trees for eventual re-use;
• corrugated iron from a shed we demolished when we built the extension;
• used Tek screws from the same shed; and
• dirt and rock from the post holes - which will reduce the amount of crushed rock we need.

In due course we're going to surround the whole compost yard with a cypress hedge.  Doing that also involves some re-use:

• carpet from our old dining room to provide the first level of mulching;
• chipped mulch from work on trees to provide the second layer of mulching;
• drip irrigation pipe from Alan and Sandy's vineyard to ensure the trees get away to a good start;
• that will be connected to a standpipe that was recovered from another location.

In the end, I think the result looks better than if we had used new materials.  Yes ... it cost less, but it still cost in labour anyway.  I think the integrity of re-use shines from  it.  But perhaps I'm biased.
F

Composting, recycling

SIve
I've been working on the compost yard over the weekend.  The intention is to produce an amount of compost sufficient to spread it across our 57 acres - rather than just make garden size amounts as we have for the last 37 years.

The compost yard is not far from the house - maybe 40 m.  But that is not a worry - compost, to the extent it smells, smells beautiful and earthy rather than anything bad.  

The core of the system is a round compost heap like this:

 The mesh is easy enough to get and it does a great job confining the heap.  Here you can see it gently steaming away as it composts.  This photo was taken on a crisp Autumn morning.

The system has broken down a bit recently with the amazing amount of rain we have had.  I plunged my hand into the pile ... confidently expecting the normal warmth ... and instead feeling clammy, wet cold.  Too much rain has soaked the pile and killed the composting process - in that one at least. 

 This next photo shows how the majority of the material gets there.  I, or someone else, recover soiled hay from the Feed Yard.

At this point real farmers tend to think we're nuts - cleaning up a confinement feeding area every day (or at least every 2 days) seems like too much work for most.

At this stage it's not for me.  Cleaning up regularly helps get good utilisation of the hay, involves checking on the stock closely, captures as much of the fertility from the dung as is possible - and, on top of all that, the Feed Yard looks good when it's done - as the next photo shows.

 
 The surface of the feed yard is just B grade crushed rock, but provided we keep on top of it it cleans up almost like the surface is concrete - except it's not - and the cattle don't slide around like they would if it was concrete.

An exciting development is that I've come across someone who collects green waste from houses in neighboring communities.  He has offered to give us reasonably clean green waste for nothing.  It works for him - because he currently has to dump it at a municipal tip - and pay for the privilege.  So pretty soon we'll have a whole lot more compostable material.

I'll post again on the other work we've been doing to get the compost yard set up for handling bigger quantities - and the purchase of a compost spreader to get it on to the paddocks.
F

Busy, Busy, Busy

ss
It's been really difficult to get around to blogging.  This is going to be an attempt at a 'catch-up'.

"As a retiree you're a failure!"

This is what my dear son Neil has told me.  Since we've been back I've spent a bit more time than I expected on city work - and I just haven't been able to get quite as much done in my time on the farm.

Personally, I think it would be unreasonable to expect the transition from 35 years of full time employment to a portfolio career to be all easy and precise.  I'm quite happy to go though a year or two where I'm feeling things out - and getting a sense of just how much I can actually fit in.  I think that is the challenge at present - understanding how much is enough.

When I was first back in the office with the firm where I was a partner for 20 years, everyone seemed pleased to see me, but the work was a bit slow in coming.  Just as I was starting to get a little concerned, 3 interesting jobs materialised and it seems like we're off and running.  One that involves travel to Rockhampton (Central Queensland) makes it a little more difficult.

Eating local

No question - we want to eat local.  Initially I thought of trying to use a food log - but that definitely takes way too much time.  I'm just going to have to estimate it - with a bit of checking analysis from time to time.

In a previous blog post I said we would look at food from 3 sources:

• our own;
• from short sustainable supply chains; and
• everything else.

1st April we had nothing of our own except a few herbs - so it was off to Farmers' Markets and the like.  I was quite surprised how quickly we could get the supermarket component down once we got started.  There is a Farmers' Market within 15 minutes drive of home every weekend - and the quantity / range of food available has improved substantially in the 2 years we were away.

Then, at the start of May - a major development.  A cull cow went up to the slaughterhouse and came back as nearly 300 kg of Moora beef.  Now 5 year old cows are not supposed to be 'prime', but the butcher said it was beautiful meat - and it certainly tastes that way.  We're particularly pleased with the mince and sausages - both of which have a real depth of flavour.

So my best guess is that our 'eating local' performance looks like this:

In just the last few days we've started to get the first salad greens from the kitchen garden - it's onward and upward from here.

Moora meat

We're very pleased with our first taste of Moora Farm Belted Galloway beef.  On limited word of mouth we've managed to sell nine 10 kg packs of meat.  Each pack includes around 3 kg of premium cuts (steaks and roasts) 2.5 kg of mince and sausages and 4.5 kg of a variety of other cuts.  Feedback so far has been very good.

We've managed to find a really good butcher to do the breaking down of the carcass and packing it into meal size packs.  We are also happy with the 10 kg pack as where we'll start in terms of how we will sell the product.  

Hopefully it will only be a few weeks before we are looking for orders for the first of several steers that are ready to go.

Compost

Our compost heaps are growing and looking good.  This is a photo of me with Winarsi soon after we got back.  Win had her first job with our family in Jakarta 20 years ago - and we have kept in touch over the years.  She was in Australia with her current employer and it was good to show her around the farm.

I'm now working out, in my mind, just what infrastructure we need to make the compost yard work well on a farm scale - rather than garden scale as we've always done before.  When you're trying to cover 57 acres, a wheelbarrow is not enough.  I think the minimum is a chipper (probably PTO based) and a spreader.  I met a guy the other day who was effusive about the capacities of a Bobcat / Skid Steer.

Joel Salatin

For the last 5 days a great hero of mine has been in Daylesford giving seminars.  Joel Salatin is an American farmer and local food evangelist.  I attended 2 events and he didn't disappoint.  He is a very bright guy.

Feed management

One of the things I desperately want to do is manage my pastures better - such that I have a thick sward in every paddock - except where the cows have just been.  Well the reality is some way short of this.  Moora has been a bit over-stocked and we're going into winter without enough carry over feed.  Plus - it stopped raining as soon as we got back from Jakarta and we didn't seem to get much Autumn growth.

Part of the solution is to get access to more land - and we now have 2 places where we are ajisting stock and I'm looking for more.  We're happy to help people get fences and water in order - it just needs to be within 10 to 15 km of Moora.

I bought 20 tonne of hay - and we're feeding that out gradually.  The cost of hay is a lot lower than it was a few years ago.

Making a compost heap

a
I had a great time yesterday!

We spent the weekend at Panaruban where a young American couple have had plans to start a compost project.  They have a new baby and their academic research priorities - so they had made a start ... and then stalled a bit.  They had obtained and cleared a site, but hadn't made much progress in actually building compost piles.

On Friday I went off to look for something to contain the compost.  I was hoping to make a version of my Australian system (see earlier compost blog post), but I couldn't find the reinforcing mesh that I thought I might use to create a containing circle.

What I did find was some lengths of galvanised fencing material.  They were 2.4 metres long and 1.2 metres high.  We cut them in half and set off for the site.

At the site we cleared the ground and made a square compost bin.  Because most Indonesians are somewhat shorter than me, I decided to cut down one side to make it a bit easier to load material in - and then place it within the heap.  Heap construction makes a big difference with composting - to the speed of the composting process - and also to whether it creates a nuisance.

Nuisance is easily avoided by putting anything that might smell or attract scavenging animals in the middle of the heap and covering it.  In Australia (or New Zealand) you encounter people who think that composting is dirty and, in some way, unhygenic.  In Indonesia the prejudice is even stronger.  The expectation seems to be that it will smell and attract rats.  Done properly this just does not happen!

Here the team of Eman, Wagiran and I are connecting up the first two pieces of the heap, before attaching them to the stake we have put at the corner.

Once the container structure was complete, we started to fill it.  There was not much material actually to hand - so I didn't expect to get very far.

However, we were being watched.  The elderly gentleman next door had been watching what we were doing - and after seeing that we were running out of material, he offered us some sweepings from his yard.  When these were enthusiastically received he went off into the surrounding areas and came back with baskets and baskets of fantastic compostable green material.  Here is one of our helpers (Nawang) emptying one of maybe 20 baskets of material that Pak Tatang gave us from heaps that were within 20 metres of our site.

We didn't take them from an existing compost heap.  Rather, it was just rough green material (not good enough to feed to cattle) that had been cut from somewhere it wasn't wanted and put in a quiet corner where it would eventually decay in place - but not be subsequently used (as compost) other than in just building the soil where it was dumped in a corner or a little gully.

In Indonesia you see these heaps of organic material laced through with plastic rubbish almost everywhere you look.  If they are inconvenient - they will often be burnt.
Smoky, smelly fires of green material (and plastic) are just everywhere.  It didn't take very long before we had a modest bin full - but with a 'hole' in the middle.  Into that hole we tipped a bag full of what can only be described as rocket fuel (in composting terms).

I asked our hosts for the weekend whether I could get some cow manure from their small dairy farm.  Pak Iskandar have me a whole bag of manure that had first been through his biogas system.  The material he gave me was almost compost like already - with very little smell.  Fantastic stuff!

When I think about the biogas process - it produces methane - which is CH4.  I think that means that all the nitrogen I need for the compost heap should still be there and still available to balance out the carbon content of the other material.

We also put in some kitchen scraps, but when I think about it, I don't think the compost heap is the right place for kitchen scraps in this environment.  Almost every house has chickens - and scraps are used to feed them.

In permaculture terms feeding scraps to chickens would have to be a better use than composting it - particularly seeing that the cow manure is available as a source of nitrogen (which cannot be fed to chickens).  The chicken manure would be an even better source - just the same scraps ... but after they have been through the chicken.

So here is Pak Tatang and I admiring our completed compost heap - after I put on a topping of grass and sawdust.  The finishing touch will be some sort of cover to stop the rainy season rain so soaking the pile that it won't compost properly.

I wouldn't mind betting that this heap will compost very well.  I look forward to getting reports on its progress.  Overall, the site looks pretty good - with one completed heap and another underway.

I am a bit ambivalent about the process however.  I find myself asking myself how I'm different from the Green Revolution gurus who came into Indonesia (and many other places) with 'new and better' technology that turned out to be 'new' but, in many cases, anything but better.

While I might think composting is better / purer than artificial, chemical fertilisers, what do I really know about how the farming systems of this area of Java really work?  My instinct tells me that, if I observed for a while, almost certainly I would learn things that would cause me to modify processes and better integrate them with pre-existing systems.

Of course the great guru of composting, Sir Albert Howard, did his learning in an environment not that dissimilar to a Javanese village.

Economic relevance - timeout for discussion of fertility

Before I go on to the next component - which will be vegetables - I want to take a timeout and blog about fertility.

So far our fertility program has been basically conventional.  We have put a tonne of lime to the acre across the farm twice - and we have used nitrogen based fertilisers when we have planted break crops and permanent pasture.  

This is the system that our contractor uses - basically the same as would be used if we were seeking economic relevance through scale (owning 500 acres) rather than chasing the extra $ through poly-culture and intensity on a smaller area. 

We have also sprayed a product called NutriSoil several times .  This has been an attempt to start a program of improving soil biology following a system called the Soil Foodweb.  We have done various soil tests and soil biology tests - which all tend to show no glaring defects.  But I'm not happy that we're even halfway to where I want to be.

For the future program I'm going to draw on 3 sources: 

• our own gardening experience (vegetable and ornamental) where we have always used compost extensively;
• a guy called Peter Andrews - who is an Australian farmer with particular ideas about how Australian landscapes function; and
• Joel Salatin - whose commitment to farming smart I find a constant source of inspiration.

A slight diversion - I married my dear wife in 1973 when I was 20 years old (she was 19).  The following year, we bought our first house.  It was built on platform carved out of the side of a Wellington hill. What wasn't rock, was solid clay and distinctly unpromising - as soil goes.  

My Mum gave us a copy of Yates Garden Guide - now in its 77th edition since 1895. The book talked about compost and how to build a compost bin - which I immediately did.  I can see it in my mind's eye now - as though it was yesterday. 

I've since built 4 other compost systems for various houses we've lived in - plus one for my Mum.  The best and biggest was at our Kilmore house - where annual applications of compost helped turn a paddock into a beautiful garden over a few years.

When we arrived at Moora, there was so much to do I just drove 4 or 5 starposts into the ground and put a circle of Ringlock inside.

  That took the first few cubic metres of the cleanup.  The second version of this system involved the same circle of starposts, but a wall made out of welded mesh.  I'm very impressed and think it's a good way of composting larger amounts.

Following on from things the Peter Andrews and Joel Salatin say, I'm going to:

• Set up a Compost Yard where we can accumulate composting material and organise everything.
  
• Put starpost mesh circle compost heaps on high spots all over the farm.
  
• Compost everything we can lay our hands on.
  
• Once a heap is complete just take away the supports and leave it to decompose in place - gradually releasing it's fertility from higher to lower land.
  
• Build other compost heaps in the Compost Yard to provide additional material for the vege garden.
  

We'll compost all our food waste, all garden waste and animal manure from the feed yard.  We'll then have to go looking off farm.  In the past we have composted offal when we've killed for our own use - and the odd dead animal.  I thought we were being a bit naughty doing this, but have recently found out that there are actually web pages on how to do it - and recognition that it's a sensible thing to do.

Peter Andrews is also big on planting trees on high ground and allowing the fertility associated with this to move down through the landscape.  What he says is consistent with what I feel so there are plans for much more tree planting.  Another thing he says is that, while all trees are good, deciduous exotic trees are often better in their effect than native trees.  Look out for the poplars, oaks and plane trees in future - as well as the natives.

I can't wait !