This feedlot has one of the largest piles of manure to remove. Now it is being turned into a commodity

Owners of Australia’s largest feedlot, Mort & Co, at Grassdale on Queensland’s Western Downs, have had one of Australia’s largest manure removal issues.  

Just under 80,000 head of cattle can be at the feedlot at any one time, producing 100,000 tonnes of manure a year.

Instead of seeing it as a waste product, the company now views it as a commodity.

Executive chairman Charlie Mort recognised the issue early.

“One of the problems in a feedlot is you’ve got to manage the manure,” he said.

“You’ve got regulatory issues that you’ve got to manage. And in a dry time, nobody wants your manure. It’s really only got a market 40 kilometres around the feedlot.”

A new solution

Access issues, rising costs and questions about the quality of imported fertiliser are problems for Australian farmers.

Mort & Co wants to change that with an organic granule solution.

The company began trials of turning raw manure into organic fertiliser suitable for Australian conditions four years ago.

Kyle Merritt heads up research and development for Mort & Co. and is excited about how the product has performed.

“Most of our soils are low in organic carbon, so the granules have 30 per cent organic carbon in them,” he said.

“So it’s a nice way to be able to put carbon back into the soil efficiently through acids.”

He said the purpose-built factory at the feedlot was the first of its kind in Australia.

They started with a pilot plant turning out 10-kilogram batches and then moved into an onsite factory that produces five tonnes an hour.

“There’s plenty of pellets on the market,” Mr Merritt said.

 It’s another thing to go into a granule. That’s a whole level of new complexity which hasn’t been done. But you need to have a granule so it can be applied through air seeders, put up through augers and stored in silos.

“There are other companies in the US that are doing a similar thing, but we’ve taken a slightly different tangent on where the products fit in our agronomic program.”

Turning cattle manure into a granule is still a secretly guarded secret, according to Mr Merritt.

“Turning it into a granule. It’s like making a cake, right? You’ve got to have the right ingredients,” he said.

“You’ve got to have the right water and you need to have an oven or a dryer to do that process. And any complication, any of those steps, you can’t make a granule.

“So it took us almost 12 months of commissioning, which was through COVID as well. Quite a complex process, but for a good cause.”

As well as being used on the farm, there have been numerous trials both in-house and externally, including with Queensland’s Department of Agriculture and Fisheries.

Improved productivity and environmental impact

The department’s principal soil chemist, geochemist Matt Redding, said in a statement:

“DAF supports the development of manure-derived waste materials from a range of animal industries as they can provide an opportunity for the development of circular nutrient economy fertiliser products,” Dr Redding said.

“Production of animal manures tends to be co-located with the areas with the greatest requirement for fertilisers, meaning the cost and emissions required for long-haul transport of fertilisers can also be reduced.

“These materials combined with developments in techniques and process understanding provide an opportunity to formulate fertilisers that enable farmlands to be managed in a way that deliberately re-couples the carbon and nitrogen cycles for better productivity and environmental outcomes.”

Cotton farmers David and Danielle Statham from Moree in north-western New South Wales are serious about producing environmentally friendly cotton.

Mr Statham, who is related to Charlie Mort and has been in business with him before, is about to start trialling Mort & Co’s organic granular fertiliser on their crops.

“I’ve been tremendously impressed with how much research and development is going into the product over the last three years and the research, all the data I’ve seen, the presentations I’ve seen have been very impressive,” Mr Statham said.

“So the concept and the logic behind putting it into a usable form for using on a broadacre scale has got a lot of merit to it.”

The road ahead

Mort & Co sees its organic fertiliser as a companion to synthetic fertilisers and believes using both products can help reduce the leaching of nitrogen.

“We see a great opportunity, for example, in the Great Barrier Reef to be able to help with nitrogen efficiency and reduce nitrogen inputs and then save on emissions,” Mr Merritt said.

“There are almost too many avenues to go down, but we’re trying to concentrate on the biological aspect of what we do because we’re dealing with an organic product at the moment.

“If we can keep within that area, that’s where the market niche is and that’s where we think the future is.”

Charlie Mort says the road is a long one and there has been plenty of trial and error.

“It’s a hard process. We’re still learning. It’s not easy. You’ve got to dry the product out to get it to the right dry matter. It’s expensive,” he said.

“We’ve spent a lot of money on the whole process. So it’s been difficult. So we’re only just getting there now.”

Watch this story on ABC TV’s Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday, or on iview.