March 9, 2025 • 10 mins
Welcome to the debut episode of Where Inches Matter, a podcast by Agraforum, hosted by Allan Piercy.
In this episode, Allan shares his journey from veterinary practice to soil science, revealing how his years as a rural vet led him to question unexplained lameness , milk fever and liver abscesses in dairy cows. He noticed their grazing behaviour and began connecting the dots between animal health issues and the urea levels in the soil beneath their feet.
Allan discusses the long-term effects of urea use on soil structure and how it disrupts the delicate balance of nutrients, leading to compacted ground, inefficient plant growth, and ultimately, animal health complications. Drawing from his firsthand experiences in New Zealand and abroad, he introduces key solutions to restore soil integrity, reduce reliance on artificial inputs, and improve both plant and livestock health.
Discover how the difference between a thriving farm and one struggling with compaction, poor pasture, and animal health challenges.
Tune in to discover how changes underground can make the biggest difference above - where inches matter.
🔎 Want to learn more? Visit www.agraforum.co.nz for details on soil testing, fertiliser strategies, and proven methods to improve soil structure and animal health.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:00):
G'day and welcome to our new podcast that we're calling
Where Inches Matter. And it's probably not what you're thinking.
The inches I'm talking about is the depth. The oxygen
goes down into your soil where it's nice and loose
and holds on to water. So the inches I'm talking about.
I'm Ellen Piercey from Agra Forum. I wanted to do
a podcast series to try and get to more farmers
(00:22):
and explain how we can help you fixing your soil
structure problems, and that's where inches definitely matter. I qualified
as a vet in 1983, and instead of going doing
possums and doing deer for the winter, the old man
convinced me I better get a solid job. So I
finished up working or starting a job at the PADI
Vet Club, and I was there for 21 years, I think,
(00:45):
before I came down to the South Island about 2000.
It was interesting. My boss there at the time, he
got a Nuffield scholarship and he went to Ireland and
his study was on the urea. The dairy cockies over
there were using. He came back all enthused, You're going
to grow less grass. And so him and 3 or
4 of the bigger farmers got together and bought the
(01:07):
first urea spreader around Waverly. And at that time, a
lot of those farms were old sheep farms. They were flat,
but they were making no money. So they either got
sold or they converted to dairy. So those those farms
had never really had much fertilizer. They'd just been sheep
farmed and they couldn't afford to put much on. So anyway,
they started hooking into the urea and they grew more grass. Alright.
(01:29):
These farms that had been using a lot of urea
for some years and up their stocking rate because you
do grow more grass. I noticed that when they came
out of paddocks there were massive urine patches. Well, you
know where the grass has grown dark green, but they
don't touch them. Other farms weren't like that and now
all farms are like it. And I interconnected that with.
(01:50):
I figured that that was something to do with the
animal health problems, because in actual fact, by the time
they went to graze it again, because they'd put their
100 or 120 kilos of your ear over, the whole
paddock was the same colour as those urine patches, and
I don't believe the cows liked it. They used to
walk into a paddock and just wander around and wander around.
(02:11):
They wouldn't just put their heads down and start eating,
whereas other farms, they still did. They don't now because
no one farms with, well, hardly any urea or haven't
done till recently, they've been forced to. But and also
that ground was hard. Like, like I was saying earlier,
you could dig a post hole if you were fit
in a minute or two there, you're chipping it, you're
chipping out hunks and it's the urea in the cow
(02:34):
urine that's making that happen. And it's not the cows fault.
It's got to have urea and it's urine. But when
you're forcing grass to grow with your rear, you get
really high protein in the grass. And long story short,
that causes a lot of urea in the urine. You
can fix it. All you got to do is balance
up the grass in terms of carbohydrate and fibre, and
(02:55):
you'll sort that. But it was associated with the soil
structure being tight. And if it's tight then you'll find
that that grass or that plant can't make as much sugar.
So the biology and the rumen are short of sugar
and they've got heaps of protein. So they finish up
using some of the protein to make energy. They get
a thing called subclinical rumen acidosis. But you get lameness
(03:17):
as a result from bacteria getting into the blood. Liver abscesses.
The incidence of liver abscess in the South Island, where
we were growing 20 ton of grass high protein grass,
is probably ten times more than the North Island. The
odd joke you might have seen cows standing in the
yard or in the paddock, and all of a sudden
blood just pulls out their nose and they drop dead.
That's because one of those liver abscesses has chewed through
(03:39):
the diaphragm, which is the bit of muscle between the
where the stomach is and the lungs, and the liver
or lungs and the heart, and chopped through a big artery. But,
I mean, I probably saw or heard of ten and
20 years in Taranaki. We'd probably have ten a year
in our practice just in Ashburton. And it's all to
do with imbalanced diet. And that is coming from soil
(04:01):
structure And the fact that we're having to use urea
to drive grass growth because it won't happen by it's
naturally because your structure's buggered. Anyway, I knew there was
something fishy about this urea, but at any rate, it
carried on like that. It was probably 20 years later
I finally worked out what it was. And in the
podcast I'll be telling you what it is. When I
(04:22):
was running Riverside Vets in Ashburton, the South African guy
walked in the door and wanted a job. He'd been
over here shearing and he was a plant physiology and
pathology master's student under a joker called Prof. Seth Pretorius
from Free State University. Anyway, long story short, he had
a product called Comcat and we played around with comcat
(04:43):
on crops and and what have you. And it works
well on New Pasture and, you know, turnips and kale
and fodder beet and what have you. Lots of things.
Any rate, a guy from Canada rang me out of
the blue one day because a mate of mine, he
was using Comcat and Southland. He's a helicopter pilot. He
was flying in Canada in the off season. So in
the summer and in one of the bush camps, he
(05:05):
ran into a farmer there that was telling him about
how he's fixing his soil structure. And then he this
guy buzz told him about the, um, about the concat here.
So the guy who was fixing his soil was the
fella who rung me and he wanted concat. So I said, yeah,
that's easy. I'll tee it up with Thomas and Germany.
He said, I still want to come and see you
(05:25):
and have a look at it. So righto, out he
came and I met him in Gore, of all places. And, um,
you know, I told him about concat and we looked
at crops and what have you. And then he showed
me this bag, a little pound bag of looked like cocaine.
And I said, oh yeah, what's that do? He says, oh,
it'll fix your soil compaction. And I said, oh yeah, well,
how many tonnes of the hectare do you need of that?
He said, no, no this will do, this will do
(05:46):
a couple of hectares. And I said, oh yeah, bloody
bullshit snake oil. He said, yeah, I know what you're thinking.
I was the same. I do all of our birder
and my sister does Saskatchewan. We've been doing it for
ten years or more and it works. So you need
to come and have a look at it if you're interested.
So I did the following winter I went over there
and I finished up being in the States for a month,
(06:07):
following around the Soilwork's guys, Glenn Rabenberg and Greg and
Cindy from Canada, and we had a conference in Colorado
Springs where there was probably 300 people. Ten of them
probably sold the calcium product. There's probably 30 farmers or
40 farmers that used it, and then everyone else was
(06:27):
just having a look. Mostly farmers from the States. Anyway, um,
we spent a couple of days listening to lectures about
how it all worked. It was quite complicated, and I
didn't really have my head around it, but I have
since I've been there several times and learnt a lot
more off these guys. But anyway, we looked at soils
around Colorado Springs and they were like concrete, but their
problem was too much sodium in the water because they
(06:49):
irrigate out of the snake River. And anyway, they were
putting this calcium product. They had calcium into the irrigation
water and it fixed it, basically fixed the soil structure.
And then we went to, um, Florida, where they were
having all the so-called greening problems with the orange industry
and it's got worse. And they're just about broke. They've
(07:10):
got no oranges because the oranges fall off when they're
about the size of a golf ball and they're still green,
but that's because the soil structure is stuffed up. It's
got no electrical conductivity anymore. So those guys are fixing that.
There's other guys like John Kemp down there helping them
as well. Now and then we went to, um, California.
And that's where it really struck me what was going on.
(07:31):
They they had heaps of farms there, mainly orchards, some vegetables,
but they were growing avos and citrus and macadamias almonds
and all that sort of stuff. And when they were watering, well,
when I went there, they'd just coming out of a
ten year drought just before they went into another one.
In that ten year drought, they'd run out of water
(07:53):
in the, in the big dams they've got there. There
was just hardly anything in them. They were ski resorts
there with a jetty. And at the end of the jetty,
she's bone dry for about 500 yards to the where
there's a little puddle where it was just no water.
So they've been using groundwater to irrigate. And because there'd
been no rain, there's been no recharge of the aquifers.
And the guts of it is it got a lot
(08:14):
of sodium in that water. And they were finishing up
putting on high sodium content water. The electrical conductivity of
it was about 2500 to say 4000, like our water. Well,
as it falls out of the sky. Zero, the water
we use at home to drink and irrigate with is
about 20 or 30. Anything under 400 is good. So
(08:35):
they're dealing with stuff that was ten times more than
that sometimes, but the guts of it is the sodium
was making the soil compacted and the water. And so
when they started putting this calcium product into the irrigation
main line, the soil was flocculating because they were fixing
the compaction problem. And compaction is because of too much
(08:56):
electrical influence of either sodium, magnesium or potassium. So it's
in South Africa where we work, it's often sodium, Aussie,
it's often sodium. But here in New Zealand it's usually magnesium,
sometimes with potassium and occasionally potassium on its own. And
only when the seas come over the over the boundary.
Like it up in Thames and down at Makiki and
(09:19):
where the sea come over the sea wall there once.
And generally it's magnesium. It doesn't matter which one it is,
one of them's having, or two of them are having
too much to say, and it's stuffing up your soil structure.
And that is because the calcium which can fix it
is so tightly bound that it can't do its job
in the soil. There's a whole lot more to the
story about soil structure and its relationship to crop and
(09:42):
grass growth, and animal health and production. I hope you're
interested and you can come back and listen to the
next episode. There's a whole lot more to tell you,
and I think it'll be a great benefit.
G'day and welcome to our new podcast that we're calling
Where Inches Matter. And it's probably not what you're thinking.
The inches I'm talking about is the depth. The oxygen
goes down into your soil where it's nice and loose
and holds on to water. So the inches I'm talking about.
I'm Ellen Piercey from Agra Forum. I wanted to do
a podcast series to try and get to more farmers
(00:22):
and explain how we can help you fixing your soil
structure problems, and that's where inches definitely matter. I qualified
as a vet in 1983, and instead of going doing
possums and doing deer for the winter, the old man
convinced me I better get a solid job. So I
finished up working or starting a job at the PADI
Vet Club, and I was there for 21 years, I think,
(00:45):
before I came down to the South Island about 2000.
It was interesting. My boss there at the time, he
got a Nuffield scholarship and he went to Ireland and
his study was on the urea. The dairy cockies over
there were using. He came back all enthused, You're going
to grow less grass. And so him and 3 or
4 of the bigger farmers got together and bought the
(01:07):
first urea spreader around Waverly. And at that time, a
lot of those farms were old sheep farms. They were flat,
but they were making no money. So they either got
sold or they converted to dairy. So those those farms
had never really had much fertilizer. They'd just been sheep
farmed and they couldn't afford to put much on. So anyway,
they started hooking into the urea and they grew more grass. Alright.
(01:29):
These farms that had been using a lot of urea
for some years and up their stocking rate because you
do grow more grass. I noticed that when they came
out of paddocks there were massive urine patches. Well, you
know where the grass has grown dark green, but they
don't touch them. Other farms weren't like that and now
all farms are like it. And I interconnected that with.
(01:50):
I figured that that was something to do with the
animal health problems, because in actual fact, by the time
they went to graze it again, because they'd put their
100 or 120 kilos of your ear over, the whole
paddock was the same colour as those urine patches, and
I don't believe the cows liked it. They used to
walk into a paddock and just wander around and wander around.
(02:11):
They wouldn't just put their heads down and start eating,
whereas other farms, they still did. They don't now because
no one farms with, well, hardly any urea or haven't
done till recently, they've been forced to. But and also
that ground was hard. Like, like I was saying earlier,
you could dig a post hole if you were fit
in a minute or two there, you're chipping it, you're
chipping out hunks and it's the urea in the cow
(02:34):
urine that's making that happen. And it's not the cows fault.
It's got to have urea and it's urine. But when
you're forcing grass to grow with your rear, you get
really high protein in the grass. And long story short,
that causes a lot of urea in the urine. You
can fix it. All you got to do is balance
up the grass in terms of carbohydrate and fibre, and
(02:55):
you'll sort that. But it was associated with the soil
structure being tight. And if it's tight then you'll find
that that grass or that plant can't make as much sugar.
So the biology and the rumen are short of sugar
and they've got heaps of protein. So they finish up
using some of the protein to make energy. They get
a thing called subclinical rumen acidosis. But you get lameness
(03:17):
as a result from bacteria getting into the blood. Liver abscesses.
The incidence of liver abscess in the South Island, where
we were growing 20 ton of grass high protein grass,
is probably ten times more than the North Island. The
odd joke you might have seen cows standing in the
yard or in the paddock, and all of a sudden
blood just pulls out their nose and they drop dead.
That's because one of those liver abscesses has chewed through
(03:39):
the diaphragm, which is the bit of muscle between the
where the stomach is and the lungs, and the liver
or lungs and the heart, and chopped through a big artery. But,
I mean, I probably saw or heard of ten and
20 years in Taranaki. We'd probably have ten a year
in our practice just in Ashburton. And it's all to
do with imbalanced diet. And that is coming from soil
(04:01):
structure And the fact that we're having to use urea
to drive grass growth because it won't happen by it's
naturally because your structure's buggered. Anyway, I knew there was
something fishy about this urea, but at any rate, it
carried on like that. It was probably 20 years later
I finally worked out what it was. And in the
podcast I'll be telling you what it is. When I
(04:22):
was running Riverside Vets in Ashburton, the South African guy
walked in the door and wanted a job. He'd been
over here shearing and he was a plant physiology and
pathology master's student under a joker called Prof. Seth Pretorius
from Free State University. Anyway, long story short, he had
a product called Comcat and we played around with comcat
(04:43):
on crops and and what have you. And it works
well on New Pasture and, you know, turnips and kale
and fodder beet and what have you. Lots of things.
Any rate, a guy from Canada rang me out of
the blue one day because a mate of mine, he
was using Comcat and Southland. He's a helicopter pilot. He
was flying in Canada in the off season. So in
the summer and in one of the bush camps, he
(05:05):
ran into a farmer there that was telling him about
how he's fixing his soil structure. And then he this
guy buzz told him about the, um, about the concat here.
So the guy who was fixing his soil was the
fella who rung me and he wanted concat. So I said, yeah,
that's easy. I'll tee it up with Thomas and Germany.
He said, I still want to come and see you
(05:25):
and have a look at it. So righto, out he
came and I met him in Gore, of all places. And, um,
you know, I told him about concat and we looked
at crops and what have you. And then he showed
me this bag, a little pound bag of looked like cocaine.
And I said, oh yeah, what's that do? He says, oh,
it'll fix your soil compaction. And I said, oh yeah, well,
how many tonnes of the hectare do you need of that?
He said, no, no this will do, this will do
(05:46):
a couple of hectares. And I said, oh yeah, bloody
bullshit snake oil. He said, yeah, I know what you're thinking.
I was the same. I do all of our birder
and my sister does Saskatchewan. We've been doing it for
ten years or more and it works. So you need
to come and have a look at it if you're interested.
So I did the following winter I went over there
and I finished up being in the States for a month,
(06:07):
following around the Soilwork's guys, Glenn Rabenberg and Greg and
Cindy from Canada, and we had a conference in Colorado
Springs where there was probably 300 people. Ten of them
probably sold the calcium product. There's probably 30 farmers or
40 farmers that used it, and then everyone else was
(06:27):
just having a look. Mostly farmers from the States. Anyway, um,
we spent a couple of days listening to lectures about
how it all worked. It was quite complicated, and I
didn't really have my head around it, but I have
since I've been there several times and learnt a lot
more off these guys. But anyway, we looked at soils
around Colorado Springs and they were like concrete, but their
problem was too much sodium in the water because they
(06:49):
irrigate out of the snake River. And anyway, they were
putting this calcium product. They had calcium into the irrigation
water and it fixed it, basically fixed the soil structure.
And then we went to, um, Florida, where they were
having all the so-called greening problems with the orange industry
and it's got worse. And they're just about broke. They've
(07:10):
got no oranges because the oranges fall off when they're
about the size of a golf ball and they're still green,
but that's because the soil structure is stuffed up. It's
got no electrical conductivity anymore. So those guys are fixing that.
There's other guys like John Kemp down there helping them
as well. Now and then we went to, um, California.
And that's where it really struck me what was going on.
(07:31):
They they had heaps of farms there, mainly orchards, some vegetables,
but they were growing avos and citrus and macadamias almonds
and all that sort of stuff. And when they were watering, well,
when I went there, they'd just coming out of a
ten year drought just before they went into another one.
In that ten year drought, they'd run out of water
(07:53):
in the, in the big dams they've got there. There
was just hardly anything in them. They were ski resorts
there with a jetty. And at the end of the jetty,
she's bone dry for about 500 yards to the where
there's a little puddle where it was just no water.
So they've been using groundwater to irrigate. And because there'd
been no rain, there's been no recharge of the aquifers.
And the guts of it is it got a lot
(08:14):
of sodium in that water. And they were finishing up
putting on high sodium content water. The electrical conductivity of
it was about 2500 to say 4000, like our water. Well,
as it falls out of the sky. Zero, the water
we use at home to drink and irrigate with is
about 20 or 30. Anything under 400 is good. So
(08:35):
they're dealing with stuff that was ten times more than
that sometimes, but the guts of it is the sodium
was making the soil compacted and the water. And so
when they started putting this calcium product into the irrigation
main line, the soil was flocculating because they were fixing
the compaction problem. And compaction is because of too much
(08:56):
electrical influence of either sodium, magnesium or potassium. So it's
in South Africa where we work, it's often sodium, Aussie,
it's often sodium. But here in New Zealand it's usually magnesium,
sometimes with potassium and occasionally potassium on its own. And
only when the seas come over the over the boundary.
Like it up in Thames and down at Makiki and
(09:19):
where the sea come over the sea wall there once.
And generally it's magnesium. It doesn't matter which one it is,
one of them's having, or two of them are having
too much to say, and it's stuffing up your soil structure.
And that is because the calcium which can fix it
is so tightly bound that it can't do its job
in the soil. There's a whole lot more to the
story about soil structure and its relationship to crop and
(09:42):
grass growth, and animal health and production. I hope you're
interested and you can come back and listen to the
next episode. There's a whole lot more to tell you,
and I think it'll be a great benefit.
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