For Omnia’s scientists, extracting humic and fulvic acids from brown coal is a little like alchemy – they take in incredibly base material and turn it into a glistening object of desire.

An end product which is fast becoming one of the most sought after in the agricultural industry as the demand for farmers to grow more from less increases.

It doesn’t, Omnia managing director James Freemantle explains, become a replacement for the fertilisers on which much of agriculture is so dependent – instead it acts as a multiplier, giving the farmers making the massive input investments a much, much bigger bang for their bucks. 

And while Omnia isn’t the only humic/fulvic player in the market, it is the one which now has direct access to the brown coal fields of the Gippsland basin from its Morwell base in southeastern Victoria.

Not only, Mr Freemantle says, are these the only known source of high quality humates in Australia, they are of such high quality they have replaced the US product, which had previously been considered the best.

Spawning, at the same time, a rapid global expansion of the Omnia brand – into both North and South America where it now has distribution networks established – as well as across the massive Asian markets, such as India, or Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.

“Australian Leonardite, the brown coal, is very similar to Leonardite from the US – except it is much better,” Mr Freemantle says.

“Because the coal is geologically younger than what is found in the US it is also much more highly oxidised and much, much richer in humate.

“The American Leonardite has often been claimed to be the benchmark standard for humic acids, until these unique oxidised coals in Australia were discovered.”

James says it is this Australian Leonardite which is the raw material for Omnia Specialities Australia’s humate agricultural products.

And while determining the soluble humate and fulvate content of materials is relatively straightforward by extraction at a high pH, he says the “miracle of the whole process is we take a fossil fuel and convert it to an organic asset”.

“It might all seem easy, but it has become a much better production story today, after more than a decade of research and development, and significant investment, to make the whole thing look this simple,” Mr Freemantle adds.

“It has also meant a massive vote of confidence from our parent operation in South Africa, which has had the vision to not just see the potential of this product, but also the need for it as food production, and security, become ever more important in our world,” he says.

“The whole Omnia business has adopted a patient, and long-term approach, indeed commitment, to the future of this business in particular and the wider inputs industry in general and I suspect generations of farmers will come to thank the company for that. Not only has Omnia put its Australian enterprise at the industry’s cutting edge, but it is also forcing other producers to lift their game as well, and that’s a win-win for all producers.”

The man with his hand on the tiller at Omnia’s Morwell operation is operations manager Francois Stander.

It is his job to make sure every skerrick of product going out the door at Morwell is exactly what its packaging promises.

Sounds straightforward, but as they both point out, the determination of humic acids is not so simple, and the methods used can significantly influence the result obtained.

Therefore, they say, it is difficult to compare claims from different companies (particularly in the US, China and Russia) regarding the humic acid content of their products.

Mr Stander says all Omnia humate products are analysed according to the Californian Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) method to determine humic acid content.

He says recent independent testing of various humate liquids, using the CDFA method of analysis, have showed some products in the market with less than 2 per cent of the humate claimed on the label.

“Incredibly, concentrations varied from between 27.8 per cent w/v potassium humate in Omnia’s K-humate 26 per cent to as little as 0.33 per cent in opposition products,” Mr Stander adds.

“Omnia is an industry gamechanger, producing inputs from what we believe to be the richest of all humates mined in the world today,” he says.

“It might sound like a bit of a school lesson, but our brown coals, or lignites, were formed when Australia was part of Gondwanaland, some 20-50 million years ago and the local livestock was dinosaurs.

“In geological time and terms, it is believed that this period was between the Late Eocene and Middle Miocene ages when, in waterlogged environments, plant and tree debris accumulated. As the layer of debris increased in thickness, the floors of these vast swamps subsided slowly, and the plant material was decomposed by the action of micro-organisms.

“To varying degrees, and depending upon the climatic conditions, plant constituents, including proteins, starches and cellulose, were decomposed under aerobic conditions (in the presence of oxygen) by a process called ‘humification’.”

This process, Mr Stander adds, results in the formation of thick layers of rich peat and humic materials.

He says this is why some people call the brown coals of Victoria “50-million-year-old compost.”

As this material was gradually covered by, then deeply buried below, sediment, the combined effects of time, temperature and pressure converted the peat firstly to brown coal and then to black coals.

“In the transition from brown coal to black coals, humate content decreases, oxygen content decreases and carbon content increases,” Mr Stander explains.

“Generally speaking, the older the coal, the lower the humate content,” he says.

“Black coals have no humate at all, but the brown coals in Victoria are rich in it because they are so relatively young – and these humate rich coals can only be found in the southeastern part of Australia in the Gippsland Basin – or in other words, in our backyard.

“Within that basin where these brown coals are found, there also occurs a unique geological material which has undergone natural, in situ, weathering and oxidation,” Francois adds.

“And this is the material which is known as Australian Leonardite.”

Which brings us back to Mr Stander and his Morwell team, where quality is the cornerstone and production is on the rise.

Not least because it is the Morwell plants which is now exporting Australia’s unparalleled humic products and their derivatives to the world – everything the company’s field staff are selling into the Americas and Asia comes from there.

It has become something of an overnight success story millions of years in the making.

Today moving the coal the relatively short distance from the deposits to the Morwell processing complex is a remarkable logistic exercise.

It is one thing to know the high-content coal is there, it is another altogether in identifying it, which is why Omnia works closely with a specialist geology operation – a business of boffins who have a long and close relationship with the region’s coalfields and can immediately pinpoint a productive seam during mining.

“They take corer samples and bring them to us for laboratory testing to confirm their potential,” Mr Stander says.

“There is a lot of pre-work in them identifying whether a seam is as good as it looks or whether it is not of a standard high enough to come to us,” he says.

“They also have to map it all out, so we know exactly where we are going and then we work with local mining contractors to use all that data to harvest the coal and bring it here.

“Which can be loads between 2000 and 5000 tonnes three or four times a year at the moment.”

And that frequency and volume is on a rising plane Mr Stander explains.

He says with Omnia continually producing more product, especially for the export market, the race is on to find ways to further finetune the process to meet the demand.

Right now Mr Stander and his team have the extraction process down to four days in tandem with the filtration to end up with a liquid concentrate that is used as a final product as well as a raw material in other products.

Potassium humate is sold both in liquid and dried form. To obtain dried potassium humate chips, water is evaporated in a novel tray drying system to end up with chips that can be larger than 10mm.

Traditionally that has been in a chip form after sieving – the ideal size being 0-2mm, although there is plenty of use for those measuring 2-4mm.

“The 2-4mm chips can then be bulk blended with other fertilisers and the smaller ones tend to be redissolved into liquid fertilisers – it’s just a physics issue and different sizes for different markets,” he says.

But as successful as the Omnia story has been, Mr Stander says they are not standing still – they are already commissioning a decanting centrifuge, which will turn a three-day separation process into four hours.

“That will further increase production throughput, and the centrifuge will remove even more insoluble, which will help us make an even better and more consistent product all within the specifications by optimising the alkaline extraction process,” he adds.

“It is also about concentration and stability – at Omnia once a batch is made it is tested again to the highest standard for humic/potassium content, density and pH value to be withing specification, before it goes anywhere. If it doesn’t pass it simply doesn’t go.

“And I think that is one of the reasons Omnia is fast becoming the industry benchmark – this isn’t just a price point market; this is about quality and performance and that’s what we deliver.”

You don’t have to take his word for it.

It’s all there in the documentation.

Mr Stander says Omnia is committed to measuring the quality of raw materials coming in and the quality of branded product going out.

“The export market, in particular, demand external certificates of analysis and companies which do their own testing for that leave themselves open to some pretty obvious concerns,” he says.

“We have literally searched the world for the best labs with which to work, and we have one in Spain with global accreditation – and even then, some of our overseas customers are very specific about who we use.

“And it must all be working, because the better our reputation the more we grow – and we are growing.”