Mosaic Map: NRM funded projects
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Water - doing more with less in Border Rivers and Maranoa
Water - or the lack of it - is one of those land management issues that's not going away.
As a result Australia's farmers and producers are looking for new ways to manage this scarce resource more efficiently.
In the Queensland Murray-Darling Basin an incentives program has helped irrigators do more with less.
In 2005 the Rural Water Use Efficiency project in the Border Rivers and Maranoa-Balonne catchments provided 28 irrigators with help for a total of 59 water savings projects on their farms.
Funding
While the irrigators each made a major contribution to the costs, funding covered up to 40 per cent of individual projects.
In 2005-06 the Australian and State Governments contributed more than $100,000 to the project, with additional funding of more than $150,000 coming from the National Landcare Program.
Activities
Work ranged from conducting efficiency audits and checking leaking dams by using electro-magnetic field surveys, to a complete redesign of irrigation systems.
Stanthorpe vegetable growers John Turrisi and his son Alf were among the participants. They grow around 160 hectares of cauliflowers, lettuce, wombok, sugarloaf and red cabbage. But with year following year of drought there wasn't enough water to go round.
"Our home farm was only operating at about 10 per cent of capacity," Alf Turrisi said.
So he decided to move from irrigation by overhead sprinklers to a subsurface trickle irrigation system, covered by plastic sheeting.
The first step was to convert 32 hectares. This involved not only hours of labour, but investment in trickle tape, filters, plastic and adapting farm machinery to the new system.
"Our costs have been enormous," John Turrisi said, "But water was so short we had to either change the way we did things, or buy somewhere else."
Achievements
The investment is paying off.
"In the cooler months we're using 70-80 per cent less water than under the overhead sprinkler system," John said. "And in summer it's around 40-50 per cent."
"We now have even less water than before we changed to trickle irrigation," said Alf, "but in spite of this we've seen a 30-40 per cent increase in production."
Rural Water Use Efficiency Project Manager Michelle Prendergast estimates the project resulted in improvements in water use on more than 22,000 hectares of irrigated land.
"Coupled with this, increases in the irrigators' knowledge and skills should help reduce the risk of salinity and improve water quality in the region," she said.
More information
- Growcom: www.growcom.com.au/
- Cotton Australia: www.cottonaustralia.com.au/
- Cotton Catchment Communities CRC: www.cotton.crc.org.au
- Qld Department of Primary Industries: www.dpi.qld.gov.au/cps/rde/xchg/dpi/
- QMDC: www.qmdc.org.au
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