The lines of the famous poem, My Country – “droughts and flooding rains” – were a stark reality for farmers along the Murray, Goulburn and Loddon systems, as two dry years turned to broken river banks and inundated crops.
During the year, State and Federal politicians bickered over environmental water and irrigation prices first soared, then dropped sharply.
From a dry start to the year, regular frontal systems combined with north-west cloud bands from the Indian Ocean, to deliver above-average rainfall, throughout most of the Murray-Darling Basin in spring.
Across the Basin, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) reported area-averaged rain totalling 187.4 mm, 64% above the long-term seasonal mean, according to Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) river management executive director David Dreverman.
“Following on from high winter inflows, spring inflows to the River Murray system totalled around 8,500 GL, which is only exceeded in about eight per cent of years,” Mr Dreverman said.
“The heavy rainfall and resulting runoff, particularly in September and October, built upon already high river and storage levels produced by above-average winter rains.”
Flood operations at Hume Reservoir lasted from early September to late November, while the Kiewa and Ovens Rivers, contributed to the picture.
Wangaratta, on the Ovens River, peaked near 100,000 ML/day, the highest since September 2010.
It was a stark contrast to earlier in the year, when irrigators in the southern Riverina and northern Victoria called on authorities to turn on the tap.
Dry conditions cut into irrigation allocations for dairy, livestock and cropping.
In the Riverina, croppers said they were concerned the “bucket” of productive water had shrunk.
“There are the same amount of people vying for a smaller quantity of water,” Deniliquin rice grower Shelley Scoullar said.
Farmers said they had been pushed out of the temporary water market – after prices hit $250/gigalitre.
They said they were being squeezed by a combination of low flows and environmental demands.
“People can cope with drought and flood, because that’s what our country is, and that’s Mother Nature, that happens,” Ms Scoullar said.
When croppers in the Murray Irrigation Limited area had to make decisions about planting rice, they were told they had 23.7GL less productive water available to them.
That meant reducing the yield by 23,700 tonnes of rice, 35,550 tonnes of wheat, or 28 million litres of milk.
Another Deniliquin cropper and grazier Bert Schultz said irrigation would allow farmers to improve their margins significantly.
“We had a very dry year, so the lakes didn’t fill up, and we understand that; the disheartening thing is all that water sitting is there and getting flushed down the river,” Mr Schultz said.
“Let’s use some of that water when there would not be high flows on the river and we cover it in a high resource year, for instance. The Water Act is just not flexible enough.”
Further south, the troubled $2 billion Connections irrigation project was again reset, with a final completion date now set for October 2020.
Water Minister Lisa Neville said the government was not going to fail, despite the initial finish date for the project blowing out from its original timeline of 2018.
“The only thing that is delayed is the completion of the physical works,” Ms Neville said,
“It’s a year longer than the water savings, but we are very confident in the modelling to be able to deliver the water savings in 2019, and the money will flow until the end of the project.”
The reset would involve a “channel-by-channel assessment”, allowing landholders to see progress and the priorities for water savings.
The reset plan included 950km of uncommitted channels, as part of a plan intended to ensure 4150 kilometres would be modernised and 204GL of water was returned to the Commonwealth, in line with the Murray Darling Basin Plan.
The reset followed concerns, raised by Loddon Valley mixed farmers, Connections was adding to the volatile mix of low rainfall and reduced allocations in that region.
The Loddon Shire council estimated only 40 per cent of the irrigation system had been modernised.
Modernisation included removing the old Dethridge wheels and replacing them with solar powered, automatic gates, as well as restoring channels to improve flow rates.
Mixed farmer Ken Pattison said many in the region were “terribly concerned “ about the whole Goulburn Murray Irrigation District (GMID).
“They have a triple outcome, they can’t access the temporary market, they have no water, they have no money and they have no feed, they are facing the perfect storm,” Mr Pattison said.
Fernihurst cropper and grazier Adam Wright said GMW even had to put pumps onto one of his channels, as the automatic gates failed.
“I’ve consistently been able to start an irrigation program and finish on schedule without having to re-water areas, with the waste of time, lack of sleep and frustration of having to go out there – all hours of the day and night – not knowing what I was going to find,” Mr Wright said.
- More on page 18.