Putting Life Back into the Soil: Paul Cox on Three Decades of Farming Differently

Paul Cox came to soil the long way around. A fall from a roof put the Verdyn founder off his feet for a long stretch, and it handed him something he had never had as a farmer: time to read.

A friend was getting solid results with a phosphate product at the time, and it set Paul asking harder questions about the health of the soil on his own place. He read everything he could find on it.

What the reading gave him was a chain of information connecting three things he had always treated as separate problems. The condition of the soil sets the quality of the pasture growing out of it. The pasture sets what the animal grazing it has to work with. A deficiency in the ground becomes a deficiency in the plant, and then a deficiency in the stock. The trouble surfaces at the far end of that chain, in animal health, a long way from where it began. From that point on Paul stopped treating soil and animal health as two jobs.

Paul traced the barber’s pole worm burden in his sheep back to copper deficiency in the soil. Persistent foot trouble and limping traced back to sulphur deficiency. He had been treating the symptom at the end of the chain, season after season, while the deficiency causing it sat in the ground under his feet.

Money was short in those days, so soil work was out of the question. He started where he could afford to start, by putting the minerals into the stock directly. Chelated minerals and apple cider vinegar in the water troughs.

The results turned up somewhere he never thought to look.

A few years on, a client came out to the property and told Paul he could not believe the change in Paul’s place. As they were in the middle of a drought, the client noted on his last visit, the trees in Paul’s paddocks had been full of mistletoe. Now there was none.

It appeared the sheep had been camping under those trees at night and what they put back into the ground was feeding them. Paul said he can still drive onto that property today and there is still no mistletoe on it. Interestingly where those treated sheep didn’t graze mistletoe grows freely on his neighbour’s boundary fence, right alongside Paul’s property in Lindenow, Southeast Gippsland.

Little discoveries like this had Paul even more interested. He says he sought out the best people in soil and animal health he could find and learnt from them: Dr Arden Anderson, Jerry Brunetti, Neil Kinsey, Graham Shepherd.

“All these experts travel down different highways in terms of their philosophies on soil and animal health,” he says, “however they all arrive at the same destination.”

One line of Anderson’s has stayed with Paul for over three decades - Treat the patient, not the lab report. A soil test is a useful tool however the paddock in front of you is telling you plenty on its own.

What the soil was telling him

Soil, in Paul’s view, is the medium holding the plant up. What is in the soil makes the difference. Growers tell him they are working red soil or black soil or heavy clay, and he says it counts for far less than they think.

Most of the time growth is governed by calcium, by magnesium and by the trace elements many programs never account for. Chromium. Zinc. Small amounts and they decide how well everything else performs. The same chain applies. A trace element deficiency in the ground becomes a deficiency in the plant and the animal is left to make up the difference from feed that cannot supply it.

Australian soils hold good reserves of magnesium, better than a lot of the country Paul has walked overseas including England, Canada & USA.

These magnesium reserves only count if the plant can reach it with calcium is the key that unlocks these minerals. Where that balance is out, magnesium stays locked in the ground rather than moving into the feed where stock can run a magnesium deficiency on country that holds plenty of it.

It is Paul’s belief correcting these mineral imbalances is what lifts conception rates, livestock weight gain and the general run of stock health. When asked Paul says he will begin by asking about the paddock.

Paul says if you get the balance right and mineral density builds in the feed that positively impacts on the animal’s performance as a cow eating dense feed gets more from that at fraction of what she would otherwise need with poorer quality pastures.

Carbon does the same job for water. A soil with carbon working in it takes rain like a sponge and hands it back when the plant wants it. Drive across a paddock in that condition and it holds you up under the wheels. It is the pasture that builds that carbon, more than the trees ever will.

A speaker Paul heard in New Zealand many years ago framed soil health in a way he still repeats: “Fertiliser can be a poison if you put too much of it on. The aim is the right elements, in the right balance, in a form the plant can take up.”

Putting his own name on the Verdyn Fertiliser Range

In the early years, Paul said he sold fertiliers products on behalf of other for years before he made the important decision to create his own range.

Travelling to New Zealand, Paul met a manufacturer and MegaTrace was born. Eight years ago, Paul and his wife Ellie decided to manufacture locally right here in Victoria improving the recipe to make it more concentrated and more powerful. “Adding our secret herbs and spices”, says Paul.

Thirty years on, the proof sits in his many farming clients’ paddocks. From farming operations all across Australia, pastoral, cropping, dairy, livestock to horticulture, the range of products Paul has developed have transformed soil and animal health.

He noted a long term dairy client has now has his empty conception rate down to two per cent this season while a well renowned Merino Stud wool grower in the near Stawell, Victoria is cutting stronger wool with no mid-season break in the staple and has a better overall lambing percentage.

Better soil grows better feed, better feed builds better stock, and none of it works without good water. “The rumen is the finest compost machine ever built,” Paul says. “Nobody will ever design a better one. The job is to give it something worth working with.”

That is the thinking behind Verdyn. Soil, stock and water are one system. Put life back into the soil and the rest follows.

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