John Feehan with his dung beetles and the products of their hard work (Images: Supplied/Private Media)

This is part two in a series about searching for solutions to the climate emergency. Read parts one, three, and four.

World leaders at the UN’s COP27 climate summit no longer have the luxury of burying their heads in the sand when it comes to climate action. That’s not so for the dung beetle. For more than 50 years, populations in Australia have helped bury part of the problem: cow poo.

Add dung beetles to a property with 4000 head of cattle and 30 tonnes of poo and the paddock is as “clean and clear as the fairway on a golf course”, dung beetle expert and distributor John Feehan says.

But they bring much more than aesthetics to the (underground) table.

Let’s dig in.

The poo problem

Australia has 28 million head of cattle that collectively drop nearly half a million tonnes of dung every day. Scaled up for annual output, that’s 182.5 million tonnes plopped in paddocks.

Australia imports about half a million tonnes of phosphate fertiliser from Canada, Florida, China and Morocco each year to placate this it. It’s costly (benchmark $25,000 a year for a big cattle farmer) and a short-term solution for soil enrichment. The chemicals are mined, processed, stockpiled and dropped on the same paddocks the cattle graze in, so (naturally) they therefore wind up in wagyu and waterways.

Compare that with the burial practices of dung beetles. They produce nutrients that stay in the ground for hundreds of thousands of years improving soil fertility, carbon sequestration (healthy soil is on par with ocean plankton), and reducing nutrient and chemical run-off.

Dung beetles perforate a paddock with holes so when heavy rain comes, herbicides, pesticides, wetting agents (insert fertiliser of choice) and residual organic matter runs into the holes rather than river systems. The toxicity of these products (diminishing with the rise of dung beetles) is filtered and neutralised underground.

“A farmer gets 1000 times more benefit from one species of dung beetle than they ever would from one tonne of fertiliser,” Feehan says.

“Dung beetles produce all these benefits without tractors, without machinery, without using farmers’ time and resources, without fossil fuels, and without producing any CO2. It’s a real freebie that nature has produced for us.”

The beetles have also banished the bushfly that breeds in unburied dung.

“You could hardly eat a sandwich outdoors in the summer,” Feehan says. “But last summer and this summer are the first in Canberra and other parts of southern Australia that will be bushfly free.”

Job description of a dung beetle

In short: adult dung beetles smell, then flock to fresh dung. They nibble on the nutrients and then work in tandem to dig a tunnel (30mm down), roll the dung down the tunnel (as much as 50 times their weight), bury the waste (as much as 250 times heavier than itself in a single nightshift), and finally mate (on the job).

Different dung beetles operate in different climates. Within colonies, the beetles specialise as “rollers”, “tunnellers” and “dwellers”. The latter lead a life of leisure, simply existing in the manure.

Why old science needs time to work

Feehan was part of the mid-1960s-80s CSIRO team that introduced 55 species of dung beetles into Australia. The research was world leading and pioneered by Hungarian-born Australian migrant George Francis Bornemissza.

Although federal government funding for the program was cut because the “return was not immediate”, Feehan has continued the work in the decades since, releasing almost 7000 colonies on “every corner of the continent”.

“When you’re changing nature, you need to appreciate that nature doesn’t change very rapidly,” he says.

John Richard’s 1500-acre feedlot farm in Coolah, now home to 13 species of dung beetles, says that changes to the quality of his paddocks did not happen overnight: “If you get a breeding colony of beetles, you’re not going to see activity from those until the third year.”

He says that now their activity is seasonal, but at “times of plenty” dung beetles will disappear a big dung pat overnight: “It’s visibly obvious what’s happening with the manure disposal.”

When the CSIRO program timed out, just one of 44 introduced beetle species had reached its climatic and geographical limits. Now Feehan says Australia has 25 well-established species. And big producers are increasingly taking notice.

Feehan is fielding 10-15 orders a day for dung beetle starter colonies. Generally, one colony consists of 1000 “ready to breed” beetles that are packaged up and sent express around the country with Australia Post.

The beetles are making a comeback.