Beetle Mania: Canberra’s dung beetle farming revolution

Australian Community Media

Tim the Yowie Man discovers an unassuming garage hiding a unique operation housing 40,000 dung beetles, described as "little nuggets of black gold" for their environmental benefits.

Transcript

00:00Down there, in a garage in suburban Canberra, is the nerve centre of John Theon's National

00:07Dung Beetle Distribution Operation.

00:10Now, John is currently packing boxes of live Bubas Bison, an introduced species which is

00:18well suited to the cold and wet winters of South Eastern Australia.

00:27That is the male.

00:28The males have a big ridge on their forehead and a couple of horns on the front of their

00:35face.

00:36And this is the female without any horns at all.

00:40In fact, you can very easily age the female by looking at the spurs on those front legs.

00:49The females do all the digging, all the hard work in the dung beetle kingdom.

00:55And if that female has dug 20 tunnels down through hard, compacted soil, those little

01:04spurs are worn off and rounded, just as the spikes on a backhoe shovel would be if it

01:12was used a great deal.

01:14So we can actually age the beetles quite accurately.

01:17So this is a young female.

01:20It's full of eggs and ready to lay eggs the night they're released in the farmer's

01:25paddocks.

01:26The farmers readily buy the beetles because 1,050 beetles of this species, Bubas Bison,

01:34is around about the same price as one single tonne of phosphate fertiliser.

01:41And the farmer will eventually get 1,000 times greater benefit out of these beetles than

01:49he would from one single tonne of phosphate fertiliser.

01:53And then a farmer has to redo the fertiliser again in a few years' time, whereas if a farmer

01:59uses the correct drenches with these beetles, he will never have to use or import this species

02:06again on his farm.

02:08The beetles will be on the farm for the grandkids.

02:11It's a one-off operation.

02:16Every cow in the country drops 12 cow pads per day.

02:22Now we have 29 million head of cattle in the country, and would you believe they drop

02:27almost half a million tonnes of cow dung a day.

02:31We're bringing phosphate fertilisers from Florida, Russia, China, Morocco, to Australia.

02:39And here we have a very valuable product already on the farm.

02:44It's already in the paddock, but when it sits on top of the ground, it pollutes the paddocks.

02:49The nitrogen in the dung goes off into the atmosphere.

02:53Bush flies breed in the dung, buffalo fly breed in the northern part, which is the scourge

02:58of the cattle industry in northern Australia.

03:01Simply by burying the dung in one, two or three days, we can avoid the pollution of

03:08the paddock, we can put the nitrogen in the dung back into the grass root zone, there's

03:13more oxygen getting into the soil through the tunnel system.

03:17The habitat and food supply attracts earthworms.

03:20The bush fly can't breed.

03:22In fact, here in Canberra, people that eat outdoors in the summertime should be very

03:27grateful for the dung beetles, because 30 odd years ago, it was actually illegal for

03:32a restaurant to put a table outdoors and serve any food whatsoever outdoors.

03:38The reason for it being illegal was that 200 bush flies would descend on whatever you were

03:43attempting to eat, and the health department considered that a health hazard, consequently

03:48they banned eating outdoors completely.

03:52And just look what's happening now.

03:53We can eat outdoors just as people do in London, Paris and New York, and it's all because of

03:59these dung beetles.

04:04There are about 1,050 beetles there.

04:08These now get put into the Canadian peat moss that's come in through the quarantine system.

04:20So there are 1,050 beetles in that box, ready to go to their new home and new location.

04:27By the way, I like pointing out, they've been showered, hair combed and teeth cleaned.

04:34And then the beetles and the container go into the Post Office, express Post Office

04:39box and taken down to the Dickson Post Office.

04:44When I have all 24 species of dung beetles distributed around the country, I hope one

04:51day that we will be able to produce two blades of grass where one once grew.

04:59That's my ultimate aim.

05:04www.globalonenessproject.org

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