As human beings, our need for water is basic and fundamental. The access to clean drinking water is one of our primary humanitarian needs. However, water is also integrally linked to food and fibre production. Without water, plants would not grow and animals would not survive. We also use water for industry and in our daily lives in many ways. Our entire planetary ecosystem is ultimately dependent on water.
Australia is a land of extremes, with crippling drought and raging floods all too familiar to us all. Water is not something that we take for granted and it never seems to be available in the quantities we need when we really need it. There are also competing needs for water, with difficult struggles to ensure all stakeholders have an equitable share.
Approximately 67% of all water used in Australia goes towards producing food and fibre through irrigation (2004 ABS data). This water generates an annual irrigated farm revenue of $9.6 billion! The remainder of our food and fibre production relies on water from natural rainfall.
However irrigators also share the pain and stress of water shortages. Their whole livelihoods rely on reliable access to water. And it is not only their livelihoods, it is the livelihoods and social well being of whole communities that those farmers support.
The story that I want to share here is one that shows how Australian farmers are among the most efficient users of water in the world. Our innovators and researchers are constantly seeking new ways to grow more food and fibre with less water. Our farmers are embracing world leading water management methods. Internationally, we are leading the way in water management and others are looking to us to learn from our experiences.
I don’t say that flippantly. I have been lucky enough to travel to many of the most significant irrigation areas in the world. From my observations our adoption of technology and careful, judicious use of water is paralleled in very few other regions, and certainly not to the wide extent it is here.
Professor of Water and Environmental policy, Mike Young, from the University of Adelaide recently backed up this assessment when he shared with ABC Rural his view that Australian irrigators are by far the best in the world and that the rest of the world is now looking to us for water management solutions.
This has not happened over night. It has been a huge industry effort, with many great minds working on this challenge for many years; well before the recent droughts and woes of the Murray Darling Basin brought our perilous water situation into sharp focus of the general population.
The Irrigated Crop Management Service was first set up in Loxton South Australia in the 1980’s and introduced for the first time a holistic approach to water management, tailoring the amount of water applied to the varying soil requirements through soil mapping and soil water measurement. This was an introduction to early concepts of Precision Farming well ahead of its time.
At around the same time, soil water measurement and monitoring services were being established in cotton growing regions of NSW, to fine tune the amount of water being applied to match the crop needs.
Thanks to the early innovators driving industry forward, these two regions can be classified as highly efficient irrigators with extremely high adoption rates of new technologies and management techniques.
Private innovative Australian companies such as Sentek Technologies then successfully commercialized new products in the early 1990’s, which enhanced these approaches and introduced the concept of integrated soil water management to the rest of the world. Many other exciting and innovative products and approaches have been developed by Australian companies since. These approaches have been widely recognised and adopted by consultants and irrigators alike.
Ground breaking research has been conducted in Australia on enhancing quality of fruit crops through regulated deficit irrigation, where water is withheld at critical times of the growing season. The practices are now adopted commonly in the wine grape and stone fruit industries to achieve exceptional quality with reduced amounts of water. Peter Dry’s team at the Waite Institute revealed Partial Rootzone Drying to the world, where the approach of only watering part of the plant’s root zone at any particular time enabled significant water savings in some crops without impacting on yield or quality.
Our plant researchers are also hard at work to develop new plant genotypes that are more drought tolerant and use less water.
Without a doubt, we still need to strive to do more, and produce more with less. We need to work through our policies to ensure our water resources are shared fairly and that we all have access to the water required to meet our basic needs. Once again though, despite all the difficulties and hurdles we are going through at the moment, Australia is leading the way in setting sound policies to secure our future water resources. These are difficult negotiations as they impact on so many people’s livelihoods, but the ground work being laid now will hopefully ensure the long term security of our water resources.
As the driest inhabited continent on earth, Australia can stand up and be proud of our achievements and how far we have come in the last 30 years!
Click here to read Part 1 of the Earth, Water, Wind, Fire series of blogs, which takes you one a journey underneath our feet.