Understanding the populationenvironment debate:
What is the irrigation industry up to?
Mr Kim Russell
Kim Russell now works for himself at the interface between Government and the agricultural industry after a farm management career extending over 25 years, which included work for large and international corporations managing irrigated food production. Since 2003 he has concentrated in strategically in two areas, water and Greenhouse issues. He has had involvement in a wide range of rural community and resource management issues demonstrates the valuable network of people from industry, government and non-government organisations that he is able to draw on.
Kim is the part-time Executive Officer of the Australian National Committee on Irrigation and Drainage (ANCID). ANCID is a sub-committee of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID). ICID has had a permanent consultative role to UNESCO (The United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organisation) since 1954. Within UNESCO the Economic and Social Council is the principal body to coordinate economic, social, and related work of the 14 UN specialized agencies, 10 functional commissions and five regional commissions – this body (ECOSOC) has observer status on ICID. ICID is dedicated to enhancing the worldwide supply of food and fibre for all people by improving water and land management and the productivity of irrigated and drained lands through appropriate management of water.
ANCID represents most irrigation water providers in Australia in 73 supply systems, managed by 31 irrigation water provider businesses, servicing over 46,000 irrigators and 270 towns as customers.
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This talk is basically about what the irrigation industry is up to. You might wonder what SAO biscuits have to do with it, but that will become a little bit clearer as I go on.
I would like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people for recognising this area as being a pretty special place to meet, a long time before we came along.
I was born in Canberra. There are not too many of us around. After a farm management career of around 25 years, mainly in the irrigation industry, we came back here to a ‘warm reception’ in January 2003.
I have got a little poem that I wrote in 1989 from a farm manager’s perspective. It is called ‘A Farmer’s Crazy Dream’.
The plough has signed the land’s receipt
Where sheep once reigned supreme
Their pads gave way in some degree
To a farmer’s crazy dream.
Not happy with its God-given course
The rivers were stemmed and turned
Its life-giving blood was draughted off
To give the soil what it yearned.
And deep below the soil’s crust
The earthen pores were filled
With crystal stores of water
For which they calmly drilled.
Through humming pumps the water rose
And spilled across the plains
Giving life to that farmer’s dreams
In fruit and golden grains.
The land transformed by water
its aspect redesigned
To turn it back the way it was
We are mostly disinclined.
And as with most dreams in our lives
Are taken with a grain of salt
So too with this water flows
A nightmare’s briny colt.
We may yet let it have its head
To gallop clean away
Or lay a gentle hand on it
And ride another day.
Let’s hope this rider and his horse
Will go forward as a team
To view in years down the track
That farmer’s crazy dream.
I think that we are actually in a position, in forums like this, to have a go at realising the dream but making sure that we have a sustainable future as well.
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ANCID – the Australian National Committee on Irrigation and Drainage – is basically to provide a forum and a voice for organisations and individuals involved in irrigation water, drainage and irrigated agriculture, and to enhance and promote their knowledge and skills with each other.
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The SAO biscuits are a way of describing our approach, through Situations, Actions and Outcomes. They are all about practical ways of doing things, getting in there. Farmers have always had a bit of a saying that we like things that work, we like them ‘cheap and cheerful’, things that actually work on the farm in terms of technology – and farmers are very good at grabbing technology and making it work in cost-effective ways.
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Since 1954 ANCID has been part of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, which has 63 subcommittees around the world and is dedicated to enhancing the worldwide supply of food and fibre by improving water and land management.
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ANCID members control about $6½ billion of assets in 73 supply businesses, with 46,000 irrigators and 270 towns as customers. So their total entitlement, as at 2004, is about 10 million ML – when it is there to deliver. We have got to remember that it is not always there to be delivered, certainly for general security water. There are 58,000 supply points, and this represents about half the water entitlements in Australia, on about 3.3 million hectares. That is about the footprint of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
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Our main focus within ANCID – and, we would like to be able to say, within the industry – is to achieve a sustainable balance between environment and productive water use, which is all about the security of the water and being able to have ongoing access to it. Without addressing environmental issues and urban demands we won’t be able to do that. We are not about table thumping in terms of a lobby group we are about getting the best interpretation of a policy, like the Prime Minister’s plan. We are all about finding ways of getting the best interpretation of that, the best outcomes to match the investments that the businesses need to make.
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This is a quick map showing you where those irrigation businesses lie.
I will now burrow straight down into some of the stuff that we do.
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Channel seepage is on the lips of most people who think about irrigation, and it is something on which we have done a number of workshops and developed technologies. John Langford is an integral part of the whole milieu of people who are working on these efficiencies at the system level and now, even more so, down to the farm level.
We also had a process called Know the Flow, which was all about metering and understanding measurement. If we can’t measure water, we cannot have any hope of managing it well.
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We have got to realise that it is not the answer just to shift all the water to high value horticulture, viticulture and the like. We have seen what happens with grapes with that approach. We need annual based systems that can move in and out with this very variable water availability that we have.
We need to recognise that if we move towards those perennial cropping systems, the water security issues will compound. And we have got to recognise the multifunctional roles of irrigation.
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A couple of the other more tactical areas in which we are working mirror very well the National Water Initiative (NWI) and also the fillip that the Prime Minister’s plan has given to the National Water Initiative. That is, we have worked a lot on benchmarking and performance reporting so that businesses can learn how a business such as Coleambally Irrigation can now achieve a 90 per cent irrigation efficiency with primarily an open channel system, but with a remarkable use of some very good, innovative technology.
There are issues of pricing and trading, and water moving out of areas and leaving stranded assets.
On water accounting and metering, it is very pleasing to see that in the Prime Minister’s plan the notion of actually investing in metering is going to be put into practice, to be matched and exceeded by business investment. The beauty of it is that all of these businesses have programs to upgrade meters over the next 20 years. What this, hopefully, will do is to bring that program into this decade, which is the time frame in which we need to measure our success.
The interface between urban, commercial and environmental uses is really important, as you will see from the short video that I will show in a couple of minutes.
The interconnectedness with groundwater is important. We are fostering a Groundwater Users and Managers Network.
We have a travel fellowship. You might have watched a recent ABC TV program where one of our members, George Warne – the CEO of Murray Irrigation – said that one of our Travel Fellows went overseas to look at desalination, and of the three plants that he visited, none was actually running at the time. So there is a cautionary note there, not to go out and build a massive plant if it is not going to be put to work. And that points to being efficient and making the best use of the resources that we do have.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so I am going to fit about 50,000 words into this video I am about to show. Just have a look at some of the technology that is in place in some of these systems.
[A video was then shown.]
You can see some of the incredible technology that is out there. It is the marriage of, as you would have seen, some of the farm-level technology with some of the system-level technology.
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That satellite image you saw on the video was about managing Barren Box Swamp, turning it into an efficient, deeper storage, and being able to manage the rest of it, which was basically, as its name suggests, a permanently inundated wetland. The importance is to manage it now as a proper ephemeral wetland.
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We have been into benchmarking for seven years now, with environmental indicators, operational indicators, and business indicators so that benchmarking is helping to drive those businesses towards more and more efficiency.
We have had input into the process of producing the Rural performance reporting indicators and definitions handbook, which the NWI is just releasing.
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Trading in agricultural water is alive and well. There is just a cautionary note there. If water moves to a supposedly higher value use, we have to be mindful of what it is leaving behind in terms of stranded assets and stranded communities, and if it results in, ‘Okay, that investment didn’t work. Whoops,’ the question of how the water is going to get back to the community that it came from.
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Water accounting and metering: meters are the critical control points of our water accounting system, and that is a really important focus.
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The multifunctional roles of irrigation relate to things like crops after rice, where water is utilised. We have the most efficient rice farmers in the world, but this year through drought they have been cut back to something like 6 per cent of the rice that is normally grown in Australia. They just have to back out when the water is not there to be used. And there will be more and more shifts to other efficient ways of farming. There are things like aquaculture, the idea of recycling, biofilters and wetlands, groundwater recharge, all will play a role in the future of water.
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In terms of waste water and drainage, 1000 tonnes of salt per day would enter the River Murray if it was not for some salt interception schemes.
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There is a plant called Arundo donax which, in the Water Commission’s community project in South Australia, we advocated using in a trial involving highly saline water. The plant has a role perhaps in utilising some of that salt interception water before it gets into some of the large, leakier evaporation ponds that it is destined for, in order to prevent that salt from going into the river.
There is a whole range of things that we can do to make better use of what are seen as waste streams, in organic as well as water terms.
[A video was then shown about the Dubbo recycling/irrigation scheme, particularly Greengrove Effluent Irrigation Facility.]
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We are also building an information portal, a ‘Lonely Planet Guide’ to out of the way information about water, and about irrigation in particular.
One of the things that is happening is looking after iconic sites like the Murray and the Barmah. But we need to look after more than just the icons.
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There is a billabong down at Narrandera that is not getting much water. Is it worth saving? It probably is. We have to come up with some mechanisms to deliver that.
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We used to grow ‘biscuit wheat’ that went into Sao biscuits – a very complex product that has been produced now for 100 years. There is no competition; there are no other biscuits on the shelf like a Sao biscuit. There have been a few try-hards, but they have never been able to do it. So it is a very complex product but with very, very simple ingredients.
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When it comes to biodiversity, for example in that billabong, if we just fenced it off, kept stock out of it, controlled feral animals and livestock, and put some water in it every three years for 10 years, we would have very simple ingredients for a quite amazingly complex product that as a farmer I can’t even begin to understand. But by marrying that to a mosaic along these river systems, we would have a substantial impact on providing the fabric upon which biodiversity depends. I think we could do that.
And it is the same with urban water.
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We have got to think of innovative ways, with innovative technology, innovative mechanisms and innovative people with passion to deliver a sustainable future for our rural and urban water resources.
