Dung Beetles - a beginner's guide

Happy Spring Time! I can't believe how long it's been since I wrote another instalment. Apologies - spring is a busy time as I get the veggie garden sorted and ready for all the planting and try to get on top of weed spraying and seeding bare paddocks. Let alone the handling of the lone weanling ready for his first trip in the float to the vet for the snip. Poor little guy handled it like a trooper!

So, dung beetles. If those two words don't fill you with excitement and joy now, I hope by the end of this post they will! I absolutely love these little (and not so little!) beetles and I can see the change to the paddocks even in the two years we've been actively managing for them.

Dung beetles are a broad classification of a family of beetle introduced to Australia, mainly from Africa. They only eat the dung of ungulates (mammals with hooves), though one or two species have been shown to get involved in native animal dung. Most adult dung beetle species feed on the liquid in manure (poo juice!) and use the fibrous material in the manure to make 'brood balls' which they bury in the soil, some as deep as 30cm.

One of the most common beetles at Pine Hill, O. Binodis

The dung beetles in the north, hotter and more tropical regions differ markedly from the dung beetles I'll be discussing here. The tropical beetles have long front legs that they use to make dung balls ('ball rollers') while the beetles we see down here at Pine Hill are 'tunnellers' and don't have the long appendages.

We are just about to get into dung beetle season, and it can't come quick enough! Currently, we have about 5 species on our farm, with the odd blow in of 2 other species trapped on occasion. They are all spring to autumn beetles, meaning they are only active in the warmer months, though we hope a winter beetle will be released and available for us soon so we have all year round activity.

Dung Beetles On the Farm
Here's how the beetles work on our farm (and yours too, if you make the effort to manage for them):

1. The beetles are immediately attracted to fresh manure and fly from everywhere to land on it and start processing the pile. 
2. They will start drinking the poo juice (yum yum!) and digging the fibrous material down into the earth, usually between 10cm and 30cm deep depending on the species.
3. The average horse poo pile is reduced to a flat, completely processed dry pancake in under an hour. No need to harrow.
4. Without the liquid in the manure, flies do not lay maggots in the poo and even if they do the maggots don't survive. We have NO flies in summer - no need for fly masks for horses or hoomans alike. I shit you not. 😂
5. As the manure is completely processed in super-quick time, any parasites or internal eggs shed in the manure die. 
6. The beetles essentially condition the soil for months, digging manure in to the soil, adding organic matter to the earth and helping the earth worms and soil microbiome. 
7. Did I mention no harrowing?

How To Manage Horses For Dung Beetles

There is one golden rule: do not use chemical wormers except the one horse wormer that appears to have no effect on the beetles and that's Strategy T. This is the wormer we use in spring, if needed, but it is preferable to use Fecal Egg Counting to get an accurate picture of your horses' worm burden.

Other management techniques that will help reduce the likelihood your horses will even have a parasite burden include:

1. Frequent paddock rotation. Always have a paddock or area of land resting that you can move your horses onto. 'Set stocking', or keeping your animals on the same land with no rest, is a risk factor.
2. New horses must be wormed prior to joining the herd, or better yet coming onto the property. Even better, get the new horse's FEC done so you can avoid worming if it's not needed.
3. If your horse is in a little paddock and you have no choice but set stocking, pick up the manure and compost it once a week. To be honest, this kind of management is far from ideal but resting the paddock as often as possible is really important. Removing the manure from the paddock also removes all the beneficial soil conditioning it offers. If you can remove the horse for a month and harrow in all the poo every few months, that is far better.

So, hopefully I've convinced you to give dung beetles a go. They are just the most amazing little critters and I can't WAIT for them to arrive this year! It's pretty easy to encourage them onto your property by just not killing them off with wormers. We did nothing at all to get them back onto our

A big beetle and very welcome here at Pine Hill, G. Spiniger

place, they just started arriving two summers ago and we've never looked back! Now we're part of the Dung Beetle Monitoring program run by Landcare and will hopefully play a small role in the big research program being run by Charles Sturt University. We're true Dung Beetle Fans!

If you're keen, please check out this website: http://www.dungbeetle.com.au