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Grant Borgward talks aboutThe Importance of
Farmer and National Sales Manager for RLFs
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Grant Borgward talks about The Importance of Building Natural
Soil Fertility
If I can talk to you today as a farmer, now that I’ve actually just received 10ml of rain and the crops are starting to germinate and grow.
Up until last nigh t, when I knew we got the 10 millimetres, I was very worried.
When I go to put fertiliser on now, I would actually like to do it in a way that will improve my soil for next year. I would like it to store more moisture, and hopefully that it will be softer so I can get a better germination. How do I achieve this ? If I look at a plant as simply being a fertiliser pump, and also being a machine to store carbon in the soil, I think to myself “well that’s really complex”.
But that is really the plant’s job. It pumps moisture and nutrient out of the soil and converts energy from the sun into carbon.
Well, that’s simple enough.
But, as a farmer, I will always want more organic matter in my soil. If the soil has higher organic levels, it can store more nutrients, and more moisture, and that generally means more profitability.
So, I’ve got a better soil type if I’ve got more organic matter across the board.
Every year that I put fertiliser on, if I can use a system that actually improves root growth, that captures more energy from the sun and gives me more net roots in the soil, then I’m likely to make more money.
I’m also building the natural soil fertility on my farm every year.
So let’s focus on capturing more energy from the sun. The plant is growing, it gets more energy from the sun and it puts on a larger root system. Well, that’s simple, but just go one step further. As the plant pulls the energy down, it then gets more plant root exudate, and that is basically carbohydrate being pumped out of the root system. This is what the soil microbes live on, and we call this rhizosphere modification. So, it’s a symbiotic relationship – the plant is feeding more plant exudate or carbohydrate into the soil, which in turn is feeding the microbial activity, and then the microbes convert the soil nutrients into a plant available form delivering it to the root, and then from the root system into the plant.
Therefore, to get a more efficient uptake of nutrients, and basically access more of the nutrient and moisture out of the soil, I need a fertiliser program that works by putting more roots on the plant in the year that it is trying to grow the crop.
And that is what builds up my net organic matter.
As farmers we should all have a strategy for building more organic matter every year.
This leads to the RLF range of products. Every time you put either a seed primer or a foliar product on, that’s got an RLF name on it, you are increasing root growth, which means you are increasing your organic matter.
And that means you are increasing your natural soil fertility.
Your farm is in a better shape next year if you use RLF products compared to just using traditional fertiliser programs.
Every farmer should be looking at ways in which to build natural soil fertility.
And every farmer should be looking at ways of building stronger, more robust root systems onto their plants in-season. So that next year there is more root system left in the ground that is going to make your ground softer, easier to seed and so that it retains more moisture to ensure good germination next year.
About Grant
Grant farms nearly 10,000 ha of mid-west land located southeast of Geraldton in Western Australia. A son of a farmer, Grant’s been bought-up on farm all of his life. In professional life Grant is the National Sales Manager of RLF for the last 18 years.
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