Over a million good reasons…
“There are 6.5 million dairy cows in New Zealand, each producing on average 27 kilograms
of dung a day. By the time you add in another 3.6 million beef cattle and 27.4 million sheep
that is over 100,000,000 tonnes of dung each year.”

Launched in 2014, Dung Beetle Innovations owes its existence to the combined efforts of co-founders Dr Shaun Forgie and Andrew Barber. These two formed the Dung Beetle Release Strategy Group that campaigned since 2009 for the introduction of dung beetles to New Zealand. On behalf of the Group, Dr Forgie provided the science for the Environmental Protection Authority application to introduce exotic dung beetles to New Zealand.

The majority of the 6,000 species of dung beetles worldwide are tunnellers, with the remainder being either “ball-rollers” or “dwellers” that live within the dung piles. Tunnellers dig extensive burrows in the soil beneath the manure. They make large numbers of dung balls in these tunnels resulting the burial of most of the manure on the pasture surface which the adult beetles lay eggs in. All this buried manure is a rich source of nitrogen and other nutrients that are available for soil microbes, earthworms and plant roots when the new generations of dung beetles have emerged from them. All these tunnels and soil mixing vastly improves soil structure and with it improved infiltration of rain water rather than it running off into our waterways carrying with it the contaminants that lead to reduced water quality.

Dung Beetle Innovations is dedicated to rebalancing New Zealand’s pastoral farming systems – improving water quality and soil health – through the establishment of tunneling dung beetles as a sustainable farm management practice by introducing 11 exotic pastoral dung beetles to New Zealand. The objective is to provide NZ an innovative, environmentally beneficial, self sustainable means to clean up its livestock pastures, reduce surface runoff and improve soil health.