Grant Paton Sustainable soils Environmental Fertilisers Ltd

Nature is a seemingly simple, but in reality quite complex thing and few people understand it.

Some claim they do, but only practise small parts of it.

A holistic approach and nothing less is what is required. We have to be mindful of everything we do and constantly need to be willing to learn new and better ways to work with nature not against it.

Decades of farming have depleted our soils of vital nutrients, trace elements, and minerals and caused soil compaction.

There's a loss of worm populations, because of over grazing and pugging and a lack of available calcium in order for earth worms to do their job.

Calcium is nature's first building block and worms depend on it. Low PH soils with poor worm population and little biodiversity, lack soil biology.

A healthy worm population can turn over 25 tons of soil per hectare per year.

This makes millions of pathways for air to pass through the soil, nodulation of clovers then pass nitrogen to rye and other plants growing in the pasture.

Clover contributes $2billion dollars to the New Zealand economy per year. Clover thrives in New Zealand soils but like all things in nature the balance must be right. Clover needs boron in order to take up and then release calcium, and magnesium to the pasture and in turn to the animals that graze on it.

Rule of thumb if the pasture looks healthy the soil, the earthworms and the animals that graze it will also.

Water is the world's most precious resource. Up to 70 per cent of the world's population now drink water that has been contaminated with heavy metals, herbicides, pesticides, DDT, chemicals, and sins of the past, which will haunt us for many years to come.

Water footprint is a word we are all becoming familiar with now through carbon loss in our soils we have lost the ability to hold moisture. Healthy soils can hold up to 150 tons of rainwater per hectare.

Leaching of nutrients, superphosphate, nitrogen and all of the above have found their way into waterways worldwide.

Humic and fulvic acids play a very important roll in stopping the soil from cracking, also keeping the soil soft with the ability to hold huge amounts of water plus stopping leaching.