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Welcome to O'Grady Rural the home of SmartBugs DownUnder !

Smartbugs Downunder logo

O’Grady Rural focuses on rebuilding an abundance of soil organic carbon by encouraging and nurturing farmers to form more diverse partnerships with nature.  This helps to create a healthier and more sustainable farming system making the world a little better.

Explore our web pages and discover how this can be achieved. Integrating biological and/or conventional methods into softer alternatives results in a regenerative and sustainable relationship with the land. This helps to develop an attitude of making a living with the land rather than making a living from the land.

O'Grady Rural manufacture and import specialised products including Moso BioChar, PandaChar, PandA (pyroligneous acid), compost tea brewers and associated equipment such as side-channel ring blowers, air pumps, vibrating screens, air diffusers, LivingSoil (microbial inoculant) and microbial nutrients.  

Moso BioChar

Moso BioChar is imported finely ground bamboo charcoal. The Australian availability of Moso Biochar enables research and development of new innovative products containing biochar to be proven under  field conditions.  Our enthusiasm and interest in Moso BioChar is well founded and is based on research and the applications of biochar in Asia, and the more recent studies and longer term observations of the terra preta do indio, the Amazon's dark earths.  These man-made soils, thousands of years old and created by the original inhabitants of the Amazon continue to be fertile and productive today.  This ancient wisdom enabled them to turn the "world's worst soil into the world's best"  by the mixing of biochar and organic waste they mastered their environment.

Compost Tea Brewers

O'Grady Rural is the home of SmartBugs and DownUnder compost tea brewers.   Brewers range in size from the 200 litre SmartBug compost tea brewer that is popular with  bowling greens. golf course superintendents and home gardeners, who are keen to enjoy the benefits of those proven plant tonics such as liquid manures and compost teas. 

The 200 litre and 1000 litre SmartBug compost tea brewers are a popular choice for small crop farmers and orchardists, while the larger 3250 litre and 5000 litre DownUnder compost tea brewers are in use on larger plantations, vineyards and broadacre cropping properties in all mainland states of Australia.  Our compost tea brewers have a well earned reputation for simplicity, easy cleaning, durability, and value for money.

SmartBug and DownUnder compost tea brewers are fitted with the highly efficient, gentle-acting  rubber aeration membranes for efficient oxygen diffusion into the compost tea. The small bubbles generated by this specially designed rubber membrane create a massive surface area of tiny bubbles, that ensures high aerobic conditions essential for the rapid growth of beneficial microbes and the humification of organic matter.

Healthy Soil Workshops    FarmReady Approved (click here) - FRTC0696

In 1450 Lenardo Da Vinci said 'we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than we know about the soil under our feet.'  Today this is still generally true. The focus has been on what we can see and measure. Soil health issues are frequently viewed with scepticism and low funding.

O'Grady Rural offers two day workshops (click here), from which participants will better understand soil health and how to overcome the reduced effectiveness and non-sustainability of many conventional practices.  Understanding the biological and ecological processes is the first step in planning and developing more effective strategies to build-up soil carbon and better adapt to climate change.

Future Workshops:
1-2 July 2010 - Launceston Tasmania.  Contact Alisha at Soil First  03 63982411
12-13 July 2010-Macksville NSW.   Contact O'Grady Rural 02 66216088

 
 
 
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