Tapping Watertight Solutions

We have just heard that NASA scientists believe there may be “liquid water” on Mars. (If you are going to have water, I guess it is all the better if it is liquid.) However, they are not able to say whether this water, probably salty, is of sufficient quality to support life.

For us back on Earth, life would be impossible without water. In Australia, we know the importance of water and we know the importance of overcoming the challenges of a dry continent in order to farm and feed the population.

Tasmania is (usually) blessed with ample rainfall. We get about 13 per cent of the nation’s rainfall runoff. The problem has been storing it.

The state has had a dry winter and a dry start to spring. According to the Bureau of Meteorology over the winter we had the coolest mean temperature since 1966, the coolest winter days since 1992 and the coolest winter nights since 1995.

Rainfall across the state was 16 per cent below average, the lowest for the state as a whole since 2008. It was below average along the west coast, most of the north and much of the east coast.

The driest parts of the state were along the north-east coast, extending into the midlands areas where farms had less than 60 per cent of the long-term average winter total.

September was also particularly dry. It highlights the importance of irrigation to agriculture in our key growing areas. Without doubt, the irrigation roll-out has been the most significant initiative in our primary industries in recent decades and you wonder where we would be without it, particularly as we enter the spring and summer seasons that promise to be the driest for some years.

Labor, Liberal and Coalition governments in Tasmania and Canberra have backed the 15 irrigation schemes in the two tranches that have been developed or are under way. It has been a bipartisan exercise.

I think the over-riding factor in this has been that governments are prepared to help if they know that, at the same time, landholders are prepared to invest their own money in these schemes. And they have.

Tasmanian Irrigation, the state-owned company responsible for the roll-out, calculates that, when they are all completed (by about the 2017/18 irrigating season), the schemes will account for more than $950 million in capital investment on and off-farm. Farmers and private investors will have contributed most of it, $628 million.

This irrigation revolution will store and distribute about 160 gigalitres of water across almost 250,000 ha of arable land. That is going to bring us a long way down the road to achieving that long-term production target of lifting the annual value of Tasmanian agricultural production from $2 billion a year to $10 billion by the year 2050.

In doing so, we will have revolutionised farming in many parts of the state. Of the five schemes in the second tranche, perhaps the most revolutionary will be in the Southern Highlands and the Swan Valley, where irrigation will be a game changer. They are two of the driest parts of the state. This new water opens up new opportunities and a new outlook on life for many farmers.

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE TAS COUNTRY ON 2 OCTOBER 2015
TFGA president Wayne Johnston