farm

Improving Soil Health in Western Australian Farming Systems

The crop yields in many shires within Western Australia yield below expectation. Often, this is due to soil contraints. So in order to better-manage soil resources, the severity and extend of underlying soil health problems must first be identified.

Final Report 10 – Business futures

Irrigation Futures of the Goulburn Broken Catchment The Goulburn Broken Catchment is known as the food bowl of Australia. It covers 2.4 million hectares and has a population of around 200,000 people (Department of Sustainability and Environment 2005). Irrigated agriculture is a major business engine in the Goulburn Broken region, producing more than $1.2 billion at the farm gate in 2001-2002 from about 280,000 hectares of irrigated agricultural land. Investment in on-farm and processing (more)...

Final Report 1 – Scenarios of the future: Irrigation in the Goulburn Broken Region

The Goulburn Broken Catchment is known as the food bowl of Australia. It covers 2.4 million hectares and has a population of around 200,000 people (Department of Sustainability and Environment 2005). Irrigated agriculture is a major business engine in the Goulburn Broken Region, producing more than $1.2 billion at the farm gate in 2001-2002 from about 280,000 hectares of irrigated agricultural land. Investment in on-farm and processing infrastructure is about A$100 million per annum (Michael Young and (more)...

NPSI Strategic Plan Phase 2

The new Phase of NPSI will focus its investment on answering questions around: plant performance and how that impacts on various farm irrigation systems; system-level sustainability: and tools for irrigators, water suppliers and policy makers to measure change. Research will be commissioned to provide either new information (smart science) or development; ensuring that the new information can be readily used by practitioners, planners and policy makers.

Changing Irrigation Systems and Management in the Harvey Irrigation Area

The project is examining issues of water use efficiency (WUE) in the South West Irrigation Area (hereafter called the Harvey Irrigation Area). A significant WUE issue is whether water savings, improved pasture yields and farm productivity can be achieved through sprinkler (centre pivot) irrigation of dairy pasture in comparison with traditional surface bay irrigation (often called flood irrigation). This project is a case study conducted on (more)...

Documenting the concepts of the

The report considers the biophysical landscape condition of the West Australian property, Payneham Vale, owned by Ron and Suzanne Watkins. It reflects on the success of substantial renovations to improve its resource conservation, covering dryland sali

Understanding Evaporation

Right now, it is very diffi cult to accurately measure the water losses from evaporation on farm dams but a recent scoping study funded by the National Program for Sustainable Irrigation estimated the loss is as high as 7,000 gigalitres per year from Queensland’s section of the Murray-Darling Basin alone. Given that water extracted from our waterways for all purposes is around 20,000 gigalitres per annum in the whole of Australia, the potential savings from addressing evaporation losses are obviously (more)...

Improving water use efficiency by reducing groundwater recharge under irrigated pastures

Approximately 65% of water extracted for irrigation in Northern Victoria and over 30% in the NSW Murray Valley is applied to pastures. In 1996, Murray Irrigation Limited (MIL) introduced a Total Farm Water Balance Policy which aimed to limit farm water use to sustainable levels and hence to reduce groundwater recharge to the district watertable. The dairy industry had some concerns with the original limit of 4 Ml per hectare and initiated discussions (more)...

New Tools for Measuring Evaporation from Farm Dams

This bulletin describes the results of a modelling study of evaporation from farm dams and a ‘ready reckoner’ in the form of a spreadsheet that:

• Calculates the cost of installing an evaporation reduction system
• Calculates how much water is saved from evaporating.