Newry dairy farmers Peter Neaves and Kate Mirams have potentially slashed their urea bill by up to 90 per cent.

The Gippsland graziers started an on-farm trial in 2019 as a Dairy Resilience Project case study, aiming to reduce synthetic inputs and maintain high productivity.

Since the trial’s start, they have reduced nitrogen use from 240kg/ha to 20kg/ha without affecting their on-farm productivity.

“The savings are huge,” Kate said.

“What we’re doing now at the current urea price, the difference is $78,000.

“In a normal year our urea savings are somewhere around $44,000, but we have spent that on lime, gypsum and trace elements, especially boron, copper, manganese.” It comes as they hosted a Soils for Life field day at their Newry property recently.

Kate said they were fully irrigated with some land laser graded before the trial’s start, which affected soil health and caused “very dry” country.

Kate said they gradually improved productivity, milking more cows and producing more milk solids.

They currently managed about 320 spring calving cows, up from 200, and reared 100 heifer calves.

“We had to learn like hell to get there,” she said.

“It’s not like you can just turn off the switch and not expect a crash.

“It’s like when you want to get fit and healthy, you have to stop doing a few things and start doing a few things.”

Kate said foliar nutrition was “key”. The trial included six irrigation bays or three pairs, with one in each with perennial rye-grass and white clover, and standard fertiliser inputs, while its adjacent bay would have multispecies pastures. Their 194ha property, bought in 2003, averaged 600mm rain on predominantly black dermasols and loam to clay soils.

Kate and Peter undertook significant plantings on-farm, introduced multispecies pastures, biological seed treatments, used foliars for mineral requirements, grazing management and “fungi-friendly” management using a humate blend.

They cut back on nitrogen use and incrementally reduced urea applications, and added fulvic acid for efficiency.

“I attribute it to hundreds of farmers who taught us how they farm … We knew farms in the ’90s were harvesting 12 tonnes of dry matter per hectare with no nitrogen,” Kate said. “We had to stop all the practices the microbes don’t like and start practices the microbes do like, we still wanted to grow heaps of feed.”

They ranked in the top 25 per cent for asset return in the 2024-25 Dairy Farm Monitor Project, as a pasture-based dairy farm with moderate supplementary feeding.

“Sometimes adversity is the thing that helps people change,” Kate said.

“The droughts in the ’80s and ’90s, the dairy industry learnt to feed grain. “Maybe this crisis is going to help farmers harvest the power of soil microbes.”

Soil health educator Joel Williams said there had been significant growing interest in soil health and reducing inputs, particularly during seasonal challenges and rising costs.

“I would say all around the world, the same thing is unfolding,” he said.

“Fertilisers are more expensive, seed and pesticides, freight; all of these costs of production have been going up over the past few years.”

Joel said typical soil health transitions lasted between three to five years on average depending on soil types.

“Some would say it’s a lifelong journey, soils don’t change overnight,” he said.

“There are some small things farmers can do to get started without changing their full system or a huge upheaval.”

He said immediate changes would include adding carbon-based inputs such as molasses, humic substances, kelp or seaweed.

Kate and Peter will now enter a “new phase” to research water dynamics across the paired trial bays.