Holds water. Holds your fertiliser. Applied once, and still working five years later. Used by orchardists and horticulturalists across Far North Queensland.
Every one of them is a Queensland horticulturalist or orchardist you could ring.
“Before the application, much of the fruit was pale — it would set but never grow to commercial crop. With TBS the trees are a dark green.”
4 ha lemons, 1.2 ha limes. 7 m³ applied 2022.
Read his story →“From one or two fruit where they set, I'm now seeing up to a dozen.” Lime production up by more than 200%, sustained across seasons.
1.6 ha, planted 2006. One row trialled 2018; whole block treated 2019.
Read his story →
600 native fruit trees — lilli pilli, Davidson plum, tamarind, lemon aspen — all established on TBS-treated soils since 2021.
Simon Mattsson is a qualified agronomist.
Read his story →Humates sold in Australia are made from leonardite — oxidised brown coal from Northern Hemisphere lignite seams in the United States, Germany, India and China, or brown coal from the Latrobe Valley, Victoria. It is ground to a dust and treated with strong alkali to strip out the humic acids.
The Black Stuff is not leonardite and is not coal-derived. It is biogenic peat from a freshwater lake bed on the Atherton Tablelands, formed over tens of thousands of years under standing water with no oxygen. The humic and fulvic acids concentrated and stayed available. We mine it and screen it. Nothing added, nothing extracted.
That is why it lasts. Alkali-extracted humates are soluble by design, built for fertigation, and require frequent applications — sometimes as often as fortnightly. Solubility runs between 90 and 95%, so blockages build up in micro-irrigation. The Black Stuff has been found still present and active in trial soils five years after a single application.
How it worksAt 3 m³/ha in loose bulk, The Black Stuff costs about $2,100 + GST per hectare, ex factory.
A single application with persistency up to five years. Against a tree crop earning many multiples of that annually, on the same ground, for years.
Tree crops, vines and intensive horticulture — where you are paid on quality and yield per hectare, on a block you can measure. Citrus, custard apple, taro, native fruit, bananas, blueberries, papaya.
January 2021. Roughly 2 m³ belt-spread across two rows of about 150 plantains each, planted into East Palmerston soil that had already carried Fusarium wilt. The control rows ran a registered fungicide programme.
At April 2024 the treated plants were carrying full bunches, with no visible symptoms and no losses. In the control, all plants were clearly affected.
Grower: Matt Dunne. Crop: Pacific plantain with a small number of Ducasse. Rate found effective: 3 m³/ha.
The Black Stuff is a soil conditioner. It is not registered as an agricultural chemical product, and nothing here is a claim that it controls, prevents or treats any plant disease.
Read the trial
All bulk pricing is ex factory, Glen Allyn.
10 litre pails, approx 9 kg. Garden beds, pots, seedling mixes, and testing a small area before you commit a block.
$29.95 per 10 L pail
Plus $24.95 postage, anywhere in Australia.
Buy a pail1 m³ bulk bags with spouts top and bottom, or bulk. One bag treats about a third of a hectare — enough for a trial strip. Tell us the crop, the area and where you are.
$900 + GST per bag, ex factory. No minimum — buy one if you want to trial it. Over 3 bags, ask for a quote. Loose bulk from 20 m³.
Request a quote