Articles

Watering our rivers – A new crop for Australian Irrigators?

Kelvin Montagu, CRC for Irrigation Futures & Matthew Durack, Managing Director Stahmann Farms Enterprises Pty Ltd

Environmental use of water is now being treated the same as water used for irrigating cotton, grapes or pastures. Under the Water for the Future program the Australian Government is in the process of spending $3.1 billion dollars buying permanent entitlements to water our rivers. Over the next few years the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder (CEWH) will end of with around 10% of the 24,000 GL of entitlements in the Murray Darling Basin.

Why not treat the environmental use of water in the same way as many of our successful irrigators are doing and use the temporary markets to support its needs. Last year irrigators traded 220 GL on the temporary or allocation market. We suggest that like irrigators, the CEWH should be looking to use the temporary market to buy real water to “irrigate” a riverine ecosystem in real need.

We would like to see a “fluid” arrangement between the environment and production entitlement holders. The temporary market offers this flexibility. One in which productive water can be temporarily traded to meet specific environmental outcomes. And the reverse of this where environmental water can be temporarily traded for agricultural uses when the water is not needed to meet environmental objectives.

The irrigation industry could also enter this new market in a more proactive fashion by contracting to deliver “Environmental Outcomes” as opposed to the direct sale of water. This would create a new product on an irrigators P&L sheet and deliver to the river outcomes with clear environmental specifications. The irrigation industry, with its expertise in managing large volumes of water, should be encouraged to see if they can manage their entitlements to meet some or all of these environmental specifications and at what production cost. This approach would offer some real opportunities for the “Multi-Purpose” use of water the CRC IF has been advocating.

We see real opportunities for irrigation industry, which will retain the bulk of water entitlements, to be part of the solution and play an active and important role in watering our rivers while continuing to support the vitality of our regional irrigation communities and our nation’s food security.

Irrigation businesses could now have another irrigated cropping decision to make on an annual basis– should they put all their water into crop production or should they look at the returns from temporary trade or environmental service delivery to support the health of our rivers?