I finally got my ride on the header with Dave - all 45ft of it! Great! I then had to do some work, so off to visit Neil and Fiona Muller for a tour and dinner. These guys make compost for their own use out of baled straw, hay, imported cow and chicken manure, lucerne silage, clay, lime and or gypsum, it did appear to be an awful lot of inputs for a low input system when coupled with the products their agronomist is trecommending for stubble digestion etc.. but Neil and Fiona are happy with it and are using very few traditional fertilisers. Cereal production has dipped a bit for now but they hope this will recover in part. Neil and Fiona are also making compost tea extractions to apply to their crops and have trialled twin N (unsuccessfully) and a whole host of other mollasses, fish, lime and kelp ased products very successfully.
Neil and Fiona have a great family of five, four of which are prospective farmers! The oldest two have their own small businesses baking and poultry breeding running concurently with school. Fiona is a great home gardener and cook -producing everything from her larder for the family from salami to salads and it tasted great. The model for the business is to be easier to run and sequester carbon (hopefully for carbon trading) and hopefully eventually become more profitable.
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