THE use of compost to improve soil health has played a crucial role in allowing Upper Nepean vegetable farm Vella’s to remain viable as a small area holding, as margins have grown tighter and opportunities for efficiencies have decreased.
Joseph Vella and his family grow baby cos and iceberg lettuce, broccoli, cabbage and kale on 40 hectares of chocolate loam and red clay soil undulating country at Razorback, near Picton.
“Water and land have always been the limiting factors,” Mr Vella said.
“Ideally, we should be rotating our crops with green manure crops.”
“We had done that for most of the history of the farm, but in recent times, we have needed to consistently have crops in the ground that bring a return in order to stay viable.”
That has created the need to come up with another way to put organic matter back into the soil.
Enter the Sustainable Amendments for Agriculture (SAFA) program run by the Centre for Organic Research and Education, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the beneficial reuse of recovered organic resources.
It provided greenwaste free of charge and the Vella’s used that as a core ingredient in an on-farm produced compost brew that has provided big production benefits which has ultimately led to boosted yields without additional input costs.
Mr Vella (pictured) mixes the greenwaste with chicken manure and brews it in a stockpile for six months.
“Chicken litter by itself creates too great a build up of phosphorus and greenwaste by itself leads to too much nitrogen drawdown so we have made it a 50:50 mix,” he said.
The farm operates under a semi-controlled traffic system. Mr Vella forms 250 to 300 millimetre beds then re-shapes with a rotary hoe and hillers and applies the compost with a belt spreader which drops in a band on the beds.
The compost goes on at 30 cubic metres per hectare three times a year with the planting of each new crop.
Mr Vella said the vegetable crops had thrived in the two years composting had been
used.
“In what we’d consider fairly dry seasons, yields have increased by 15 per cent across the board,” Mr Vella said.
