Myles & Julie Ballentine

Hatch Program 3

1 Nov 2022

About

Myles and Julie Ballentine are a husband and wife team located in the Fitzroy Basin. They run a successful mixed cropping farm. As farmers they wanted to grow sustainable crops, building soil health and resilient crops but also being profitable. Wanting to make the move to regenerative farming - Myles and Julie attended a biofertilizer upskilling session which they felt was the ‘missing puzzle piece’ for their farming practice. However it came with challenges - it was untested on broadacre cropping, it was time and labour intensive and there were huge batch variations in what they were making and what was in the market.

The Idea

Julie and Myles decided that they could take the time and hassle out of producing a biofertilizer for broadacre farmers by developing the solution on their farm in large batches. With a few rounds of testing on their own crops to discover that it delivered the same crop yield (the most important factor for all farmers), they reached out to their local regenerative community to see if others would be interested in trialing the product and a few responded positively. The Ballentine’s understood that the fertiliser needed to be applicable at different stages of the crop lifecycle and as such created 3 different delivery points with their liquid biofertilizers. Although the initial benefit of the Brix Booster is crop and soil health - Myles and Julie are hoping to prove that it also increases the quality, nutritional value and taste of the output.

“The Hatch program helped us examine our idea and really delve into who our customers are.”

What's Next?

Myles and Julie are looking to conduct microbiology testing to prove the ‘brix’ levels of soils and the value added to crops by using the Brix Booster. They are continuing to explore the customisation of different batches to support individual farmers' soils. Myles and Julie are hoping to conduct another 100 customer interviews now harvesting is complete.