13 May 2007
Dry rivers, high hopes
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Dry Rivers, High Hopes
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Millions of dollars have been spent on building an enormous irrigation infrastructure on the Murray Darling system. The rivers are dry, and the pumps stand idle, with even the interest on the loans not paid. How did it come to this: greed for water, bad farming, or the drought? Will God answer John Howard's prayers? Reporter Ian Townsend.
Transcript
Transcript
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
THEME
Ian Townsend: As the worst drought on record began creeping up on Australian farmers 15 years ago, their response was to turn more and more to irrigation, to keep growing the crops to feed the country.
As a nation, Australia has become locked into a method of farming that can't be sustained.
Last month, the Prime Minister, John Howard, received an alarming report.
John Howard: The report which has been delivered to both State Premiers and to me, indicates an unprecedentedly dangerous situation. What the report in essence says (is) that unless there are very substantial inflows, and for that read heavy rain leading to runoff into the catchment areas, prior to mid-May 2007, there will be insufficient water available to allow any allocation at the commencement of the 2007-2008 water year for irrigation, the environment, or for any purposes other than critical urban supplies.
Ian Townsend: It's now mid-May, and there's been some rain across the country's parched eastern States, but it's nowhere near enough to break this drought.
It's come to this: that the Murray-Darling Basin, which produces 40% of the nation's food, might not be able to feed us anymore. The taps at 15,000 farms are about to be turned off.
So has this water crisis really been caused by acts of greed, or an Act of God?
John Howard: I said in Queensland a couple of days without any sense of irony, or any sense of being other than totally serious, that we should all pray for rain. Because the situation for the farmers of Australia in the irrigation area of this country, the Murray-Darling Basin is critical.
Minister: I'm going to ask you to please stand to sing the hymn 'Glorious Things of You are Spoken''
ORGAN
Ian Townsend: I'm Ian Townsend, and welcome to Background Briefing on ABC Radio National.
In this small church in the middle of a dry, brown paddock on the plains of south-western Queensland, farmers have been praying for rain on and off, for more than 100 years.
Minister: We give You thanks for the gift of rain, but Lord, we do pray for more to revive the parched earth and to encourage the planting of winter crops. God of grace in Your mercy hear our prayer.
Ian Townsend: People here on the Darling Downs, near the very top of the Murray-Darling Basin are familiar with drought, but nothing like this.
As it became drier, Queensland farmers in this region started embracing irrigation, to stay one step ahead of the drought. They've been drilling bores and building dams to store the water from floods that have become less frequent over the years.
All this made good sense at the time.
But now, with Australia's longest river system, the Darling, running dry, farmers and towns downstream are pointing the finger at Queensland for taking too much water out of the river system.
One farm in particular, Cubbie Station, at the very edge of the Darling Downs, has become the focus of the debate.
Mike Rann MP: Cubbie Station is a disgrace to the nation.
Tony Windsor MP: I believe that Cubbie Station should be purchased and the water that has been contained in that particular should be released into the system.
Ian Townsend: Senator Heffernan.
Senator Heffernan: I'd like to make a short speech concerning some puzzling policy decisions and potential conflict of interests surrounding what I could only describe as the national disgrace of water diversions in that part of the Murray-Darling Basin called the Culgoa Lower Balonne.
Ian Townsend: We're driving towards Cubbie Station, 600 kilometres west of Brisbane. It's a vast farm of 96,000 hectares. It's about the size of the City of Canberra.
The water here is stored in enormous dams called ring tanks, which rise above the plain. They can hold enough water, it's been said, to fill Sydney Harbour. And in a good year they give this farm enough water, without rain, to grow $100-million worth of cotton.
But when we arrived there a few weeks ago and drove along the rims of these giant dams, there was no water. Down on the bottom, flocks of emus are scratching around in the dust.
Australia's largest irrigated farm is dry. The Joint Managing Director of Cubbie Station is John Grabbe.
John Grabbe: We've really been in drought now for six years. Down the bottom end the Lower Balonne St George Dirranbandi, where Cubbie is, we're six years in now. Over that six year period we've averaged year by year if you average it out, 15% crop a year. We're looking at a zero coming up. We're not alone; everyone else in the area is in the same boat. So storage capacity on Cubbie as we speak is zero.
Ian Townsend: Cubbie Station is the biggest single irrigator in the Murray-Darling Basin, and it's often been blamed for everything that's gone wrong here. But there is no water at Cubbie either. The last time these dams were full was in 1996.
We'll return to Cubbie Station later. To understand how this could happen, we really need to go further upstream, to the river system's very source.
Imagine a map of Queensland, a roughly drawn triangle with the point at the top. The flat bit at the bottom is the border with New South Wales. The headwaters of Australia's longest river is just above the border on the Queensland side.
There's a map on the Background Briefing website showing this river system.
At the headwaters of this river system, on the Great Dividing Range, is the Queen Mary Falls, and it's here we'll start our trip.
Nearly 4,000 kilometres downstream from these falls is the sea, near Adelaide. But it's a complex series of rivers that make up the Darling River, and up here, at the start, it's called the Condamine River.
It says a lot about the state of the Condamine River, that the only place it's flowing at the moment is here, at its source. When this thin stream of water tumbles over this cliff and hits the valley floor, it vanishes into the riverbed.
These falls at the head of the Condamine have become a tourist attraction, and there's a camping ground nearby.
The Condamine is an icon of the Australian outback, romanticised in songs and stories, a byword for the bush and pioneers, farms and drought. And here, at the start of the Condamine, we find someone who's beginning an expedition down this river, all the way to the sea.
It's something Erica Neate, who grew up on a farm on the Darling Downs, has dreamt of doing for most of her life.
Erica Neate: One flood when I was little, we were standing on a concrete causeway, and someone said, 'If you jump in here, you'll come out at Adelaide'. So I said, 'Let's do it!' But they said, 'You'll drown', and all the water was swirling on the first corner and I thought, Well, they're right. But 40 years later, it's time to do it.
Ian Townsend: I see a bicycle and a canoe. How are you going to do the river if it's so dry?
Erica Neate: Walking. Now because it's so dry you can actually walk in the river bed. It's like a highway - you just follow it. The pushbike is for those few places where there's no roads come in contact with the river, and for safety reasons it's important; John in the support vehicle can keep an eye on me in case of snakebite and stuff like that. And then the kayak is for when we find water again. There's a bit in the Warwick weir at the moment; I'm told you can paddle up and down for 500 metres.
Ian Townsend: Erica Neate's journey down the Condamine might seem straightforward, but as I said, this isn't one river system, it's many different river systems, tacked end on end. Each has its own dynamic, and as it passes through four Australian States, it supports different ecosystems and agricultural communities, depending on the climate, and the soil, and the water it can carry at that point.
Here, for instance, at the top of the Murray-Darling Basin in Queensland, are dairy farms. Down the road from the Queen Mary Falls, farmer Wes Judd has just finished milking his cows.
Hello.
Man: Gidday.
Ian Townsend: I was wondering if Wes was still here. That's all right, it's Ian Townsend from ABC.
Mrs Judd: Come on in.
Ian Townsend: Thanks.
Dairy farms use a lot of water, in fact, they're the biggest water users in the Murray Darling Basin.
On Wes Judd's farm though, it's been so dry for so long that he stopped irrigating a long time ago.
Wes Judd: Yes, we've got an irrigation licence out of the creek just down here a little bit further we've got the pump set up, but we wouldn't have turned it on I don't think for 15 years.
Ian Townsend: Fifteen years?
Wes Judd: Yes. It's 20ks from here to the top of the creek to the top of the catchment. You could walk all the way nearly and not get your boots wet.
Ian Townsend: Have you seen this before?
Wes Judd: No. And think probably most of the old timers here in the district haven't either. And in this creek that flows into the Condamine, we'd normally get four or five what we'd call freshes and floods a year. But we haven't seen that for a long time.
Ian Townsend: So in response to this drought, what Wes Judd has done is buy another farm downstream, where he does have water.
Wes Judd: All right, well we might go and take a look at it.
Ian Townsend: All right.
CAR DEPARTS
Ian Townsend: The farm Wes Judd has bought is at Millmerran, 100 kilometres west of here.
Millmerran is the beginning of Queensland's vast western plains. The country here is flat, like a giant table top, tilting a little towards the west. The soil's deep and it's black, and there's been hardly any rain this summer. But some farms here have just finished harvesting their summer crops of sorghum and cotton. These are the farmers who have licences to irrigate.
Wes Judd has just been baling his sorghum for his cows to feed them over winter. This farm has a licence to pump water from a bore.
Wes Judd: Yes, are the bores that service out here, that underground system. And without that irrigator and that irrigation, well there wouldn't have been a crop here this time, as there is in many parts around. There's a lot of black paddocks around.
Yes, the kangaroos have been on. Kangaroos and emus heading down here for a bit of water.
Ian Townsend: The only way Wes Judd can grow a crop is to pump water up from 30 metres below the surface. The Condamine River runs through this farm, but there's no water in it.
But Wes Judd, like many irrigation farmers in this area, is planning to build a dam for the next time it does flood. When he bought this farm, it also came with a licence to harvest floodwater.
Well we're on the riverbed of the Condamine River.
Wes Judd: In reality there's nothing in the river. So most of these banks along here in the last 10 or 11 years haven't had water outside it.
Ian Townsend: But you'd still be prepared to build a series of storage ponds for a flood allocation?
Wes Judd: Well I would, we'd do that in a way in which we would incorporate into what we're doing already. I've, well I suppose we've rearranged the way we farm around the fact that the seasons are abnormal, and you can't rely on them any more, and we also can't rely on when you're going to get rain.
Ian Townsend: If there's a lesson for farmers in this drought, it's that those who have irrigation, win. Despite the drought, some farmers here have managed to grow crops. And this simply is good farming practice. As I said, Wes Judd bought this farm so he could feed his cows and continue selling milk to Brisbane. We've all benefited from this.
The Condamine River here loops north-west through the Darling Downs towards the Jimbour Plain, where we were earlier in that little church, praying for rain.
This is the heart of the Darling Downs As far as the eye can see, there are farms, fields of brown stubble from last year's harvest, beside fields of bare black soil. The soil here is two metres thick and it has some incredible qualities.
Farmers have been growing wheat here for 100 years. In the heart of the Jimbour Plains is the farm of Roly Schmelzer.
Roly Schmelzer: Here you can see this is a large crack and that will go down a metre-and-a-half, and this soil self-mulches; it actually, as it dries out around the top of the crack, it crumbles and falls in, and that loose soil will actually fall down as deep as a metre, and in some ways that's the way the nutrients, some of the raw organic matter, works its way down into the soil. Also when you get a storm and the ground is badly cracked, the sediments and raw organic matter is actually washed down to the cracks. That's why it's called self-mulching, and it naturally breaks its own compaction up through the wetting and drying cycles.
Ian Townsend: If you were going to design a soil for farming, this is what it would be.
Roly Schmelzer: I think so. It doesn't need any cultivation; if this were to set up gently here, you could really germinate any seeds in it, it's quite amazing.
These modern techniques are one thing that have got us through the last five dry years. We've been growing crops using conservation farming methods, zero till methods, and zero till machines that put seeds in the ground, you can barely see where they've been, you've got minimal disturbance, minimal evaporation. And these techniques, up until the last 18 months, have enabled us to get crops where we just would not have got them using orthodox techniques. It's quite amazing.
Ian Townsend: The old farming techniques, the soil was compacted and the water ran off. In fact with conservation techniques, it keeps the water on the property, as it would have done in its original state, and less water would have flown to the river originally anyway.
Roly Schmelzer: That's right, Ian, and it would not have left the property until the soil profile was full.
There's an area of similar soils in southern Texas, but I think these have the edge on water holding capacity.
Ian Townsend: So, the best soil in the world?
Roly Schmelzer: It's not worth anything without moisture.
Ian Townsend: The problem here is that Roly Schmelzer has to rely on rain. There's no bore water and the Condamine River, even if it was flowing, is 10 kilometres away. He hasn't had a crop for 12 months, and no significant rain for years. But just down the road is a farmer who did get a crop, but only because he managed to harvest some water. He's an irrigator.
Hello?
Stuart Higgins: How are you going?
Ian Townsend: Good. How are you Stuart?
Stuart Higgins: We've got a 500 hectare irrigation farm about 45 kilometres north-west of Dalby on the flat floodplains of the Darling Downs. Irrigate half the farm and the other half of the farm is grass and riparian zone with some woodland on it. We're on the - well use your imagination - mighty Cooranga Creek, which is a tributary of the Condamine River, and just behind us here we have a ring tank and a pump station which supplies that ring tank, and in front of us here we've got the Cooranga Creek, which actually ran back in February.
Ian Townsend: You may remember Stuart Higgins. He was the farmer who helped listeners grow their own cotton on ABC Radio National's 'Bush Telegraph' and on 'Background Briefing' a few years ago.
Since then, things have changed. The drought's deepened, the cotton price has slumped, and he now grows sorghum instead.
Stuart Higgins is also in demand as a farming consultant; he speaks internationally about farming, and he's been studying how agriculture's been changing across the country in response to this drought.
Stuart Higgins: Australian agriculture is in for a big change at the moment. If there's one thing I've learnt, necessity brings about change and there is a hell of a lot of necessity going out in rural Australia long river systems, and to do with irrigation.
Ian Townsend: The drought, says Stuart Higgins, has sped u what's become a fundamental shift in farming.
Stuart Higgins: What we're seeing is a growing group in agriculture called the 'agriculture of the middle'; it's an American term, whereby you have farmers who are too small to make the step into large commercial production, and satisfy low-cost high-production world markets. So they're too small to go in that direction, yet they're too large to make the step back to niche marketing, organic, direct-to-the-consumer selling a lovely warm story and getting high value for their product. And they are squeezed right in the middle, and it's a big problem in agriculture at the moment. Society needs to realise then, that farming will go more in a particular direction and that will be a more commercial approach to farming, and Australia may have to reassess its vision of what it wants rural Australia to look like.
Ian Townsend: And so you'll get these big farms, bigger farmers and the sort of Cubbie size efficient farming conglomerates?
Stuart Higgins: That's correct. And what you will then have is Australian agriculture will use to justify the reason it is why it is, is that we are extremely efficient at turning natural resources into a dollar value for the country. And that's a very legitimate argument.
MACHINERY
Stuart Higgins: These boys aren't here to waste time.
Ian Townsend: You can see the changes right across the Darling Downs. The big water storage ring tanks of the irrigators dominate the landscape. Although most of them are nearly empty now, they can hold lake-sized volumes of water. People ski on them. Some are so wide that the wind can whip up waves big enough to erode them from the inside.
Industrial sized steel pipes pump the water in and out of these storages, and water the thirsty crops that surround them. These ring tanks are as familiar a sight nowadays as the windmills that still stand against the sky, broken, groaning in the wind, a reminder of farming methods long gone.
WINDMILL SOUNDS
Ian Townsend: The windmills and the broken water troughs next to them tell the story of sheep, but there are no sheep any more.
When the price of wool crashed, the farmers grew wheat. And then the world demanded cotton, and paid big money for it. And cotton needs lots of water.
This is a naturally dry part of the country, and so the problem of water was solved by taking it from these rivers when they did flow, and storing it in these big dams.
In fact in the 1970s, '80s, and early '90s, the Queensland government thought there weren't enough farms in the State's west, and it encouraged people to look for sources of water.
It offered farmers licences to take water from the Condamine River, and it encouraged them to buy pumps and to build these dams.
But did it give too much water away? It's hard to know how much water this system can provide for farming, because the river here seems to be either in flood, or it's dry. No-one really knows how much water flows down it in an 'average' year, because there's no such thing - the availability of water fluctuates wildly.
Daryl O'Leary: Gidday.
Ian Townsend: Daryl, is it?
Daryl O'Leary: How are you? (DOG BARKS)
Ian Townsend: At Chinchilla, Daryl O'Leary irrigates watermelons from a weir on a nearby creek, a tributary of the Condamine River.
Daryl O'Leary: This is just all sandy loam, they call a lot of this the daisy sand. It's very deep and the roots just go right down into it, and that's why we can still grow melons like this and get away with it.
Ian Townsend: What else could you grow here?
Daryl O'Leary: Oh, we can grow oats, cereal crops if you want to, but it's not high yielding for cereal crops; we just normally grow oats or grass, or graze all this country. Melons are probably the best for this country, especially watermelons. Rockmelons, they can grow here but rockmelons haven't got as big a root system as these fellows.
Ian Townsend: The Condamine's been the subject of a 10 year study to see how much water it can spare, and the Queensland government's just released a plan of how irrigation will now work. Based on this study, it's decided to let farmers such as Daryl O'Leary keep the water rights they've already been given. But they won't get any more.
Daryl O'Leary: It's really worked out that scientific, it's been done, we've been on this process for ten years, and the extraction rate that we're taking in the whole Condamine Balonne in Queensland, it is sustainable. Like it's just not a water grab, it is sustainable and that's how it will be. And if we can make it sustainable even these lighter years, if we ever go back to a full rainfall pattern, you know, there'll be plenty of water. So it's all going to be defined within the Act, whereas now I think a lot of that has been a bit grey, and a lot of people never understood it. And I think some of the irrigators didn't understand it either.
Ian Townsend: But there's no water.
Daryl O'Leary: That's the other - yes, no water. So we're just sitting here, waiting, but this could be our life from here on in, we might never be able to use our allocations, there's no water to use.
Ian Townsend: The fact that there's no water at the moment doesn't seem to be causing too much worry for irrigators such as Daryl O'Leary. In fact, they're irrepressibly optimistic. Irrigation gave Daryl a crop this year, and it will rain again.
It's a matter of regret for many farmers here, though, that they didn't take up more licences back when they had the chance.
Daryl O'Leary.
Daryl O'Leary: I think a lot of us missed the boat. We didn't see irrigation as a big source for our district earlier, and of course now when the moratorium came on, there was no more development, so it's sort of halted all development, whereas some of the other fellows downstream, and a few maybe upstream, jumped in and got some good development under way.
Ian Townsend: And the development's still under way, despite the drought.
CAR STARTS
Ian Townsend: After Daryl O'Leary's farm, the Condamine turns south-west, towards the New South Wales border. It passes through the town of Condamine.
Around Condamine it's desperately dry, but one young farmer's just started irrigating his parents' farm.
Brett Bidstrup: I'm Brett Bidstrup, and this is Alderton, about 50ks west of Condamine. A sort of mixed farming operation. We've got cattle and a few thousand acres of dryland, and about 1100 acres of irrigation under three pivots, and then the rest is flood irrigation.
Ian Townsend: What do you grow?
Brett Bidstrup: Sorghum, peanuts, chickpeas, mung beans, millet, wheat, barley, cotton, corn, whatever else is going to make us some money at the end of the day. Yes, we started growing peanuts a few years ago. We've just got really red, loamy; it's where the pine trees usually grow in this red loamy soil, and pretty much ideal for peanuts. We decided to give them a go.
Ian Townsend: This is your first crop?
Brett Bidstrup: Oh, this is my first crop, but we've grown them here about probably three or four times. There's no substitute for in-crop rainfall and this crop probably doesn't look as good as it should, because of lack of in-crop rainfall. But you can water as much as you want, but nothing's going to substitute for rain on a crop. But they still look all right, I reckon.
Ian Townsend: Brett Bidstrup has recently put a large pump and two enormous steel pipes into the Dogwood Creek, a tributary of the Condamine River. The pipes seem to dominate this small creek, but he's only allowed to pump water when it floods. And three months ago, it did flood, after a storm upstream. And he now has a full dam and he's carefully planning to plant winter crops.
Brett Bidstrup: There's so much research going on now in water efficiency that there's breakthroughs coming out on how long we should be watering for before your ground becomes saturated and you're losing moisture just through going through the profile. And so people are using bigger pipes now for shorter amounts of time, and cutting them off before they get right to the end, and just sacrificing that last little bit of crop, just to save water, sort of thing. So everyone's getting on board doing that. Everyone knows how precious water is now, and if you put a price on water, then you've got to make the most out of it that you can. So it's just an asset we've got and you've got to make it work.
Ian Townsend: Could you use more water?
Brett Bidstrup: Yes, of course, and if I could build another storage I could develop a lot more land, yes.
Ian Townsend: But soon, Brett Bidstrup might be able to develop more land by buying some water from other farmers. Water trading is already big business elsewhere.
Last year, the Queensland government put the rights to 1100 megalitres of water from another river, the Moonie, on the market for more than $1-million. Later this year it'll be selling 8,000 megalitres from the Warrego River, further west.
Just before the Condamine River reaches the town of St George, it becomes the Balonne River. Same river, different name.
It's here at St George that irrigation's really taken off n the past 30 years, after the government dammed the river for farmers.
Now most farmers around St George also have their own dams to store diverted floodwater. Near St George is the 250 hectare vineyard owned by Table Grapes of Australia. It's managed by Richard Lomman.
Richard Lomman: When we built our storages here, we built them on history, saying that we'll fill our storages once every two years, basically. There's some of the cotton guys who probably have developed to fill their storage one in ten years, because they've got the land area to make use of that water when it becomes available. But we needed to be a bit more secure with ours, so we haven't gone as hard, but we've got storages here we've never filled.
Ian Townsend: You'd think at the moment though it's not going to happen, wouldn't you, after the last summer?
Richard Lomman: Well I think the development has probably slowed down after the last couple of years, because obviously there's a limit to everyone's funds, but there's certainly been a lot of money spent over the last five to ten years on getting things ready for when it'll come back, and we're all sure it will.
Ian Townsend: Any idea how much money has been spent in this area on the infrastructure?
Richard Lomman: It'd be a big guess, but I'd say anywhere between $50-million and $100-million over the last ten years.
Ian Townsend: And it's yet to pay for itself. You need that flood and at least a couple of crops to get that money back?
Richard Lomman: I'd say the interest wouldn't have been paid, no.
Ian Townsend: So could they have made a mistake?
Irrigation here relies on what's been largely an educated guess, based on rainfall and flood patterns that don't exist any more. An enormous amount of money's been spent and it hasn't paid off. Yet.
One good year in this area can produce more than $200-million worth of cotton and grapes and grain, but that hasn't happened for a long time. This year, only a few farms grew a cotton crop, and that used up the last of the water.
And these farmers are taking a risk, not just with their livelihoods, but with the rivers downstream. And this is the hot political debate at the moment.
Farmers downstream, on the other side of the New South Wales border, say the water taken out of the river system in Queensland has left them with less than they need to survive.
Richard Lomman, a Queensland irrigator, admits water's been held back.
Richard Lomman: To be perfectly honest with you, you'd say that over the last few years we've definitely stopped the water flowing over the border. But that's because of the government storage here, for no other reason. I mean that would be every time that fills, that's 80,000 megs; it might come in dribs and drabs; if that was to go straight through, some of it would get to some of the users down there, it certainly wouldn't be enough to go on the floodplain, so those graziers who might be whinging, wouldn't have had any more water of the last however many years. It's all just economics really. We're here because there's water here, and we've developed an entitlement which we've been given by the government and we've been made to develop by the government, or lose. It's worth a lot of money; all the bank mortgages are highly geared to the water allocation people have, and the water harvesting right they have, so it's just part of the economic environment of the bush.
Ian Townsend: The farmers here are now locked into using this water. They don't really have much choice, or they'll go broke.
Richard Lomman: If we want to live out here, we've got to make the system work for us. If we want to have a pristine environment, you'd get rid of all the weirs and storages, and when the water runs out, we all move to the city, and then when the water comes back we all move back again. Obviously that's completely ridiculous. So we have to use what's out here to our best advantage, without hurting it, as much as we can. So I think we've achieved that, at this stage, anyway.
Ian Townsend: Richard Lomman.
Downstream from St George, this river system does a little trick.
The country is so flat here that the river fans out into an inland delta. The Balonne River turns into four new rivers: the Culgoa, Birrie, Bokhara, and the Narran.
It's down this river delta that we're travelling in the early evening. The kangaroos at this time of the day are looking for grass beside the road. The road's littered with kangaroo carcases, and it's a slow drive to avoid adding to the carnage.
When we finally reach the town of Dirranbandi, I meet Henry and Don Crothers and David Carsons, three long-time farmers in this region.
Henry Crothers's family has been farming here for 140 years. He spent a lot of money turning his grazing property into an irrigated cotton farm when things were looking good.
Now though, the picture's grim, even for the irrigators.
We're talking at a local watering hole, the motel bar.
Henry Crothers.
Henry Crothers: Very simple, really, when you see your house dam going dry, and you can see the carp swimming around the bottom, and there's a dead cow on the other side, and you turn the tap on, you're getting little more than mud, you know you've got a problem, and that's what's the bottom line is. So you're going to have to make some arrangements. You're going to have to cart it, or get smart.
Ian Townsend: You must be doubting the wisdom of your initial risk to invest so much money. Is this a worry that perhaps the seasons have changed
David Carson: These two blokes said that they've been here for - their families have been here for 140 years. They've seen the good times and the tough times come and go, and it's not gong to change. If anyone can make a judgment, surely it's people like that. So I mean, if you come out into this part of the world, it's going to get tough. So don't come out here and cry about it. Just get in and get on with the job, and yes, that's what people out here have got to do, and don't whinge about someone else is doing something that you don't approve of, just make your own operation work the way it should, and get on with it.
Ian Townsend: Is it arrogance to have a system of farms here that rely so much on water, on irrigation?
David Carson: But all we're doing is working with nature, that's exactly what we're doing. When the big years come, we take the water, we conserve it, and we use it in the ensuing years. That's all we're doing. We also understand that there will be years when even the water we've conserved runs out. You've got to be able to hack it. If you can't hack it, you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. That simple.
Ian Townsend: David Carson, a cotton farmer, with Henry Crothers at Dirranbandi.
RADIO PLAYING
Ian Townsend: It's a 20 minute drive from Dirranbandi to Cubbie Station the next morning.
You get some sense of how big this property is when you drive around it. The long dusty roads that follow the vast ring tanks vanish into the distance. The fields are so big you can hardly see the other side. The machinery, the pumps and the tractors, the harvesters and sheds, are dwarfed by the scale of the earthworks.
Cubbie Station was once a humble sheep farm. It was bought by a man named Des Stevenson in 1983 who with the help of John Grabbe, planned to build one of the world's largest irrigated farmers. They started by buying up the neighbours.
This area's ideal for cotton. The soil's very fertile and the country's flat, and it's dry. The problem of water was solved by building these enormous dams to capture the irregular floods.
It works like this: when it floods and the water reaches a certain height, gates are opened and the water rolls down channels through the property into the vast storage dams. It's a clever system of channels and rink tanks. One good flood can give the farm three to five years worth of crops.
The Joint Managing Director of Cubbie Station, John Grabbe, is one of the architects of this system.
John Grabbe: Those dams are not designed to fill every year, they're designed to fill once every ten years or so, and you build your bank of water and you draw upon that bank as the years go on. And in agriculture you in fact plan to run out because you don't want water laying around evaporating, you want to convert it to productive purposes.
Ian Townsend: And Cubbie has run out of water, although not quite as planned. The last time Cubbie was full, awash with that Sydney Harbour volume of water, was ten years ago.
Rightly or wrongly though, it's still being blamed for the current water crisis. The Darling River's run dry, too much water's been used in Queensland, and Cubbie's a large, conspicuous user near the very top of the system. It doesn't look good.
So Cubbie's gone to a lot of trouble to tell people that it is a good water manager, that it takes only the water the system can spare, and that it doesn't harm the environment.
For instance, it's tackled evaporation by building deeper dams. It has computers monitoring the soil in each field, and even down in the water tables beneath the fields, to make sure any crop gets just the right amount of water, and no more. There's no danger from rising salt, it says. And there's no pollution. None of the water that's used here ever gets back into the river.
But at the moment its tractors are in the shed, its cotton gin is idle, many of the workers laid off. This farm and its massive investment is sitting there, waiting. There is no water, and no crop.
But downstream, there's still talk that the politicians should buy it back. And this is something John Grabbe won't even consider.
John Grabbe: Oh, look, I think that's a ridiculous proposition. I mean as Cubbie, we're an irrigator the same as every other irrigator in the Condamine Balonne; we have water rights that were issued by government at a level that I believe is sustainable. So we're about, as Cubbie, 15% of the total extractions in the Condamine Balonne. So I think that's a ridiculous proposition. I mean you buy the water rights back, and take them away, you're going to have a heap of stranded assets there that were built obviously in good faith; you're going to create a lot of unemployment, and you're going to do all this in a system where the sustainable level has been struck. For my mind, it's ridiculous.
Ian Townsend: Is it a concern though, that politicians might be considering this? We see the Federal government going to take over the system, and they're talking about buying back allocations.
John Grabbe: Oh look, Ian, I think a lot of this talk I think comes from the press, or from maybe some politicians that have some - I can't even find the words -
Ian Townsend: Well I suppose they're representing their constituents, and they have a political line to push.
John Grabbe: Well maybe they do, but think that anyone in a serious decision-making position very, very quickly sees how ridiculous a proposition that is.
Ian Townsend: But the pressure's still on to do something about Cubbie.
The Australian government's setting aside $10-billion in a National Water Initiative to try to improve the way farmers use water. It wants to take the management of these rivers away from the States, and it also has $3-billion to buy water back if it thinks some farmers are using too much. Some people still want Cubbie stripped of its water.
The most recent call came from South Australia. Adelaide gets its water from weirs on the Murray River, downstream from where it meets the Darling River. The weirs are low, and there's been a suggestion that if Cubbie was bought back, 500,000 megalitres of water would flow all the way down the Darling and solve Adelaide's problems without the need to build another weir.
But this river system doesn't work like that. It's incredibly complex; as we've seen, it's really a series of waterways, many of which are dry at the moment. If half a million megalitres was to be released at Cubbie in one big rush, even if that was possible, it probably wouldn't make it as far as South Australia.
At the Australian National University, an environmental historian's been studying the complicated social and political history of the Murray-Darling River system.
Dr Daniel Connell.
Daniel Connell: Queensland impacts very little on what happens in South Australia, because most of the water that potentially could go, or get stopped, that happens in the Murray system, not the Darling system. But the other thing is that Cubbie Station hasn't had water in its storages now for quite a long time. I mean Cubbie's been subject to the drought in the same way that everyone else has, and although the storages technically could hold about two-thirds of the volume of Sydney Harbour, there's been nothing in them for quite a long time. So you're not going to solve South Australia's problems by buying out Cubbie Station.
Ian Townsend: The other thing about irrigation is that if it is a problem, it's of our own making. We happily consume the cotton shirts and the grapes, wine, milk, wheat and the grain-fed beef. Most of it's cheap and fresh, because it's been grown under irrigation in the Murray-Darling Basin.
Daniel Connell: The immediate situation is a product of the fact that we've got an extremely severe drought. It's inappropriate for people to 'blame' irrigators. I mean we live in a society that is dominated by the products of irrigation. Irrigation is the most efficient way to produce a very large number of the crops and foods and fibres that we depend upon. And we're happy to wear them. Irrigators aren't the prime source of the problem, we're all part of the problem.
Ian Townsend: But there are legitimate concerns about the effects of irrigation in Queensland on the farmers just over the border in New South Wales. And here's another example of how complex this whole system is. Three months ago, there was a small flood upstream. Now, incredibly, this trickle of water has come down the rivers and crossed the border.
Michael Treweeke: What's happening at the moment is that what's called a compensation flow, which is a release of water -
Ian Townsend: Possibly get ahead of it.
Michael Treweeke: Yes, we'll go back up, it might be interesting now. If he's there, we might just get out here.
Ian Townsend: Yes, have a look.
Michael Treweeke: Yes, jump across the river here.
FOOTSTEPS
Michael Treweeke: Some of the times when you can actually step across the water, Ian.
Ian Townsend: On the dry bed of the Narran River, you can lie on your stomach and watch this small tidal wave come towards you, filling up cracks and scattering the ants.
A dead tree has fallen across the river here. They've been trying to burn it to clear the way for this water that's now flowing around the still-burning tree stump.
Michael Treweeke: Here we have the start of the headwaters over the compensation flow, and I'd say it's probably moving at 10 centimetres every - yes probably a centimetre a second, I guess. So in the context of the length of the river, it's fairly slow, Ian. It's probably moving a kilometre a day, if you're lucky.
Ian Townsend: And it's soaking in straight away, isn't it? It's crawling down these cracks.
Ian Townsend: At Angledool Station, Michael Treweeke is praying it gets as far as his weir.
Michael Treweeke: We really don't expect this to go too much further.
Ian Townsend: We might just go up here and have a look at where it's trickling around the burning stump.
Michael Treweeke: The actual water quality, Ian, doesn't look too bad to me; we expected it probably to be - you know, after a long absence of water in the river, you expect the headwater to be fairly grubby and full of sediment. But it's not too bad, I've seen worse.
Ian Townsend: What would you do with this water if it does get to your property?
Michael Treweeke: Well domestic water supply for the homestead, and in 40 years since we've been actually at Angledool, this is the first time where the house is actually in imminent danger of running out of water.
Ian Townsend: But this could well be the last water Michael Treweeke sees for some time, running down this riverbed, and he's worried.
Michael Treweeke: We realise that you know, drought conditions are probably the major problem at the moment, and extraction upstream has not been a factor in this flow per se, but what really worries us as floodplain graziers, and dryland farmers, is the fact that in the future that larger flows will definitely be affected, as they have been in the past.
Ian Townsend: On the way back to Brisbane, I drop in to look at the nearly empty Beardmore Dam at St George. This is where that small stream on the Narran River came from. And I find something I haven't seen for a long time.
Brisbane, where I live, is running out of water. I'm being asked to take 4-minute showers, and I'm only allowed to water my garden with a bucket for a couple of hours once every two days.
Here at St George, during the worst drought on record, in one of the driest parts of the Murray-Darling Basin, there are sprinklers keeping the grass green at a picnic area. It's the middle of the day, but there's no-one else around. The car park's getting as much water as the grass.
SOUND OF SPRINKLER/CAR DOOR CLOSES
Ian Townsend: In the scheme of things it's not much water. But it's the image of water being wasted here that's disturbing.
For someone from Brisbane who's been old there's no water left because of this drought, this use of water appears almost obscene.
I park my car beneath the spray, to wash off the dust.
SPRINKLER
THEME
Ian Townsend: Background Briefing's Co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinness. Research and website, Anna Whitfeld. Technical operator, Andrea Hensing and Leila Schunner. The Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett. I'm Ian Townsend and this is ABC Radio National.
THEME
Further Information
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Ian Townsend
