Dept of Climate Change, Energy, Environment & Water
Pelletised Compost In Cattle Farming
Tim Mendham, a third-generation farmer from Blayney in New South Wales, participated in a pelletised compost trial and his ideas about compost changed. With healthy soil his top priority, Tim learned that traditional compost isn’t always the best choice.
Unlike regular compost, which sits on top of the soil and relies on rain to mix in, pelletised compost can be sown into the soil. This helps nutrients reach the roots faster and more effectively, improving soil and plant health.
The results? Higher yields, better efficiency, and healthier soil. For Tim, pelletised compost is the future.
Watch Tim’s story to see how compost is changing his farm.
Tim Mendham: Our soils are where we make our money really.
The better the soils, the more money we make out of it.
My name’s Tim Mendham. I brought the family farm about 18 years ago off my parents here at Blayney, up in the cold high country.
I’m third generation on this farm.
I really want to make my farm better for my son and give him a really good start with it.
I really am interested in the compost side because we need more organic matter back in our soils.
We are doing everything to get our soils better, our farms better, our stock better.
We’ve got old soils here, but because we take so much with hay and silage and trying to run so many cattle, we needed to put a lot back in.
So we use a lot of synthetic fertilisers, but we found that we had to start using compost, just really for carbon and just to keep our soils up.
The synthetic fertiliser doesn’t have any carbon in it, it’s just phosphorus, sulphur, the trace elements where the compost gives us our carbon and a bit more topsoil for us.
I’ve been using compost properly now for about 12, 13 years, and then I got offered to do the trial on the pelleted stuff, so I thought I’ll give it a go.
Pelletised compost is a very new thing. It was lighter than normal product.
With compost you got a lot of moisture in it and a lot of bulk where this is a lot drier and broken down into a smaller product.
We go 13 tonne to the hectare with compost where if we go back to pelleted we could get back to 100 kilos a hectare.
We could spread it wider. So it’s a lot quicker to put on for us than normal compost.
There’s more bulky than usual so we had to spend more time calibrating the combine to do it. We’re putting the pelletised compost down the chute with the seed so it’s sitting right next to the seed instead of being on top.
I was excited to see whether we can actually sow it down to combine in our case, and whether it would work.
We usually sow a crop at about an inch deep, where we’re spreading compost on top and hoping the moisture takes it down.
We were asked to do a trial, and we had to do four different rates of compost down the boot with the crop.
When we stripped it and we could actually see the difference in yields and weighed each one, so then we actually knew what the difference in the yield was per section, and you could definitely see the difference in the result between the different rates of fertiliser and no compost.
Well, I got a real shock. I didn’t actually think we’d get much of a result. It wasn’t the case and when we stripped it, it came back a lot better than I thought.
It actually was slow releasing and it did the whole way through the crop and did the job that it’s supposed to done.
They gave me the data afterwards that it actually was slow releasing, and it did the whole way through the crop.
When you get such a big difference in yield from different rates, it goes to show that your cost might only go up by $50 a hectare, but your yield goes up by so much so then your profit margin is a lot bigger.
If we go to a pelletised, at the end of the year, we could cut a lot of time, a lot of costs.
The pelletised compost is the way to go.
It’s going to keep a lot more trucks off the road. It’s going to make us a lot quicker to spread it and it’s a lot less movement for us across the paddocks.
And we’re going to be a hell of a lot quicker spreading pelletised compost compared to normal compost.
https://www.dcceew.gov.au/about/news/pelletised-compost-cattle-farming