NPSI review july 2010

Across Eastern Australia drivers for change in irrigated farm businesses include: reductions in water allocation, increase in allocation variability, high market volatility, increased regulation as a result from competition for water with urban, industrial and environmental use.

So it is interesting that while a number of “macro” variables directly affect the capacity of our farmers to make better choices and medium term plans, most of the work and effort is on managing the short term e.g. improving water productivity at the paddock level.

In addition, many of our best irrigators are already reaching high levels of crop water use efficiency.

The underlying hypothesis in our project is that there are opportunities to increase water productivity in $ of farm income/ML by improving the allocation of resources at the whole farm business level, and this is the focus of this project.

The key research question is then: How to increase returns per ML of water available at the whole farm level?

Here we will talk about three things we are doing to support farmers in answering this question:

The first is to develop the required modelling tools to represent complicated irrigated farm businesses that take into account the availability of land, water, infrastructure, labour, machinery, capital, the farmer and its farm management

Second is that to achieve this we needed to engage farmers to help us identify and understand their issues, constraints and opportunities for improvement in their businesses

And third, is the need to capture the diversity of business types across the different irrigated agro-ecologies by developing a network of real case studies that could help us to scale out learnings across within and across regions.

Let us go into a bit of detail by looking at some examples. (1Mb pdf)