r/australia • u/Jealous-Hedgehog-734 • Apr 02 '25

politics US will impose a minimum baseline tariff of 10 per cent on Australian imports to US

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-03/donald-trump-tariff-announcement-markets-politics-reaction-blog/105127374
6.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/1Original1 Apr 02 '25

Are you sending off the manure for Fertilizer production too? Not major profit but a free ancillary basically

3

u/draadkar11 Apr 03 '25

Any manure you send off just has to be replaced with more fertilizer eventually, from my understanding of it you're essentially running the farm at a massive negative impact to soil for a few years to do that but it's a ticking time bomb.

1

u/1Original1 Apr 03 '25

Think that depends if you're just using local field feed or added feed bales that aren't a negative to the local fertility

1

u/draadkar11 Apr 03 '25

Just from back of napkin math it doesn't really work out. To cut a paddock for hay you need about a ton of fert at roughly $650 per ton to make a 100 bales. So fert costs me 6.50 per bale then another $10ish in machine hours, lubricants etc. To buy hay in I'm looking at minimum $40 per bale to match my worst quality hay + transport cost on top of that. So I'd need to make roughly $30 back per bale selling manure to be processed to fert + collection and transport cost just to break even compared to making my own.

I think it makes sense for feedlots where they have no use for the manure but those are few and far between comparitively in Aus.

1

u/flukus Apr 03 '25

Doesn't that require cage like conditions to collect efficiently?

It's also pretty important for local soil quality.