20 NEWS 04
THE DOWNS FARMER tuesday, May 30, 2023
A g r i c u lt u r e
Toowoomba Chronicle
JACINTA CUMMINS
Throw a light on biosolids
Tuesday May 30, 2023
Changes to growing practices help this family farm transform black soil to pure white cotton
T
hird-generation farmer Grant Porter knows the importance of previous knowledge. If something’s not broken, why try and fix it? But wearing his mechanical engineer hat, Grant is also continually pursuing improvement by using his skills to adapt farming operations to factor in changing variables like soaring input costs and the unusually wet seasons on his Brookstead farm for the past two years. But farming wasn’t always part of Grant’s life plan. “Farming inspired me to become an engineer because I’d grown up seeing my dad and uncle always fixing or changing things,” he says. “It (fixing things) was part of life growing up, but engineering took me on a different trajectory. “But when I was working in the resources industry, there was always one bone in me thinking about how we were ripping the earth apart and scarring the landscape to get coal, and that I was enabling this. “I wasn’t really happy living in the city and where that and my career would take me.” The fly in, fly out existence also didn’t bode well for the family he hoped to start with wife Elle. These realisations coincided with Grant’s uncle, Glen, getting sick, and Grant going back to the farm to help out temporarily in 2018. “My uncle passed away eight weeks after being diagnosed with cancer so it was a really tough time and I saw dad struggling and I could see an opportunity to apply my skills and what I’d learnt from the mines to save some expenses. I also wanted to do things which were good for the environment like I’d seen my dad and uncle do growing up.” As Grant watches his three-yearold son, Jimmy, running in between rows of cotton plants nearly ready to harvest, he’s confident in his and Elle’s decision to build a life in agriculture, alongside his father, Brett, and brother, Mark, in their joint operation Porters Farming. The Porters use the same agronomist as their neighbour Johannes Roellgen and while this means they share some practices like fertilising with cow manure, they also do many things differently because of the nature of the land they’re working and their business models. More than 20 years ago, Grant’s father and uncle were in the first group in the area to apply biosolids on their farms. While the word biosolids can have negative connotations, it’s not quite what the average person thinks. A by-product of the sewage treatment process, biosolids are high in both nutrients and organic matter which improve soil health and consistency, and lead to improved plant health. Grant says the response from the paddocks they first put biosolids on “opened up a can of worms”. “Our soil tests were saying we have plenty of phosphorous and potassium but not enough nitrogen so all we TCHE01Z01MA - V1