FROM 1914 to the late 1990s, irrigators in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA) enjoyed an unbroken run of 100 per cent allocations, often spiking to above 100 per cent. Then the 21st Century came along.
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From 1998, allocations fell to under 10 per cent in 2008. There has been some modest recovery since, but the agricultural landscape has changed - probably forever, CSIRO researcher Don Gaydon suggests.
He said that under climate change, the high allocation years of the past will be much rarer as higher temperatures, increased evaporation and decreased runoff into dams changes water flow regimes.
CSIRO's Sustainable Yields Project has estimated that there will be at best a 14 per cent reduction in annual average irrigation allocations by 2030. At worst, the reductions will be in the order of 37 per cent.
The same conditions that reduce allocations will also make crops thirstier.
All this points to a future in which the line between irrigation and dryland farming is increasingly blurred, Mr Gaydon said.
Irrigators have already picked up some of the strategies of dryland agriculture.
He expects that trend to grow, with irrigation water being used more strategically to maximise returns or ensure survival, rather than being the central element of a farm's management.
