© Rosemary Grant Rae Young removing a giant tea bag filled with compost from the brewing unit
They've been successful in getting a Federal Government $104,000 Caring for Our Country grant to put the biology back into the soils on the broadacre.
"Farming systems have very high carbon emissions," Rae Young said.
"If we're going to have to enter the carbon pollution reduction scheme, none of us are going to cope.
"We're going to have to come up systems that work so that we can be accountable."
Rae Young is a dryland sheep producer growing fine wool in Tasmania's midlands and one of the leaders of the project to come up with alternative systems to maintain and build soil fertility that work and are practical.
Right now Rae and Lindsay Young are brewing up thousands of litres of beneficial micro organisms in a shed that's now full of 1,000 litre compost tea containers at their 'Lewisham' farm not far from Ross.
"I think a glass of wine would be much nicer than these brews," Rae said.
"We've added 1,000 litres of water and to the water we've added food for the biology, so we've added kelp and fish, humate and a little bit of molasses and we also added a little bit of organic oatmeal flower and then there is a big tea bag to which we add the compost."
"When they get into the brew there's all this food for them and they go 'whoa, it's party time' and they start breeding, and they breed up massively so after 24 hours you have absolutely millions upon millions upon millions of bits and pieces in your brew."
Rae says quality compost is the vital ingredient.
"If you've got lousy quality compost you'll have lousy compost tea, but if you've got compost that's full of a variety of bacteria and protazoa and nematodes and fungus, that will come out into your tea.
The Youngs started 12 months ago with just one brewer and 1,000 litre conventional spray tank, and have since upgraded.
The Youngs also have a truck with a 2,000 litre tank to spray the potent compost tea culture out on to pastures.
"We've just upgraded to a new spray unit that holds 2,000 litres and we can do 20 ha at a time and with four brewers going we can do 80 ha a day," Lindsay said.
One aspect of the trial on six farms is to work out how much of the brew to add to the pasture, with comparisons under way measuring the benefits of 200, 100 and 50 litres per ha.
"One of the objects is to work out methods by which you can do this broad acre," Rae said.
"A lot of the money we got is for measuring so we can say in Tasmania, this is what we did on the paddocks and this is what happened."
The first results from the projects soil tests are expected in four months' time.
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