Of course, if they did that then we could actually measure their own output of useful products or services and then determine how much water went into their output. And the likes of deluded Green would discover that by far the biggest waste of good water was the amount that was used in their own food. Given their obvious lack of productive output, their total water use would be allocated to far too little output of note.

It was ever thus. Some people are not only a complete waste of space, they are also a complete waste of water as well.

It is not new. There was a particular intellectual giant called Eamus who’s academic triumph was to calculate how much extra “value” would be created if all the water that irrigates rice was bottled and sold on the world market. It was an impressive number, but for the inconvenient fact that most of the people who depend on our rice for their survival do not have the spare cash to buy bottled water, even if they lived long enough without our rice to become a regular bottled water buyer.

It was all in his head, a classic piece of academic onanism. And some poor sods had to negotiate around that kind of village idiot tripe to get a pass grade for the subject he was lecturing in. You would worry more about the competence of those who passed rather than those that he failed.

What happens to vegie prices when 400 000ha of cotton and rice country converts to vegetable production? (130 000ha or so produce veg now) .

Last I heard they were wanting to scale back acreages
of grapes due to oversupply and low prices, despite being drought impacted.

Any consideration of the relative merits or otherwise of seepage from a chanel MUST include its relevance to the volume of water that actually flows over that m2? Your site did no such thing.

You quote the official evaporation rate for Wagga Wagga but fail to deduct the annual rainfall to give the net evaporation loss. Unless, of course, you seriously believe that rain doesn’t fall on irrigation ditches.

You also seem to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that some of the “wasted” irrigation water actually provides valuable ecological services, being used by grasses, forbs and trees that in turn, supply habitat to native species. But of course, this is never counted by the green tight arses who regard all human impacts as negative and measure all irrigation water as an “extraction” from the ecosystem and refuse to recognise the connective significance of agricultural activities.

They don’t even appear able to comprehend the fact that Murray Cod actually like to live in irrigation chanels because the water levels, and therefore the food supply, is far more reliable than what had formerly been provided by the river itself. So the dumb turds do their little surveys in the river and conclude that the species is in decline. Nope, they just recognise a good ecological niche when they find one. Which is a lot more than can be said about the green bull$hiterati.

Ron, your question “How can the purchase of an irrigation licience from a farmer with no present entitlements, put extra water in the system” When it rains, and it will, there will be more water for those that are left and the environment. Now that’s not too hard to understand is it?

This site should be called the “Last Gasp Blog”. The last gasp of AGW deniers and now the last gasp of inefficient water users against the water buyback plan.

I will leave you now with some water use figures which tell the story of your untenable position to the rest of Australia.

Return per Megalitre of water used by crops grown in the MDB
rice, $200 livestock pasture grains, $300 sugar, $400 cotton, $600 grapes,$900
fruit, $1500 vegetables, $1800

You are also spot on about the resale of returns to the sytem. My Brother had an irrigation farm at Cobram until they took back 45% of his supply and sent him out backwards. But he mentioned that whenever it actually rained he would have to pump water back into the chanel because he already had a full soil moisture profile.

This was done at his own expense to avoid waterlogging but the authorities never gave him or anyone else any sort of credit or refund for this returned water. It was also never included in the official volumes of river flows, even when, as you say, it was re-sold down stream.

The other interesting point to note about S Greens ignorant take on water issues is that they use this seepage rate/m2 as an implied cumulative figure. So the gullible reader will multiply the daily seepage rate by 365 days to get what might appear to be a very large volume of wasted water. But in fact, once the soil in the immediate vicinity of the chanel is saturated then seepage slows considerably. And it is certainly not a continuous loss.

The other point that S Green has missed completely is that smaller but more frequent applications of flood irrigation are much more efficient than all other options. Instead of the standard 100mm application (1 ml/ha) my brother applied 65mm but more often and got superior results (on his place but not necessarily on all)

So get back under your rock, Simplistic Green, you are totally out of your depth.

Actually the Barrages were built (30’s-40’s) at a time when water extracted for irrigation was less than a third of today’s “normal”. Now correct me, but the govt plan to buy back 3000GL or so, suggests 8000GL of licensing is OK, but according to you 3500GL(30’s extraction figures) was too much then. Something doesn’t add up. Either the Barrages were built to create a permanent freshwater lake, or extraction at any level during low inflow months was too much. Me thinks the former. Accepted knowledge suggests the lakes were fresh 95% of the time- well so far they’ve been “fresh” 100% of the time since 1940.

Have to laugh every time someone believes we shouldn’t grow cotton, but grapes instead. There’s an important food crop if ever there was one. A couple of years ago they paid growers to leave them on the vines- pure water efficiency there. They tell me there is chronic oversupply of grapes this year too, drought notwithstanding.

What people miss when complaining about cotton is that not only does cotton produce lint, but over a tonne of seed per acre. Seed that produces oil for human consumption, but also high quality feed for animals. Ask your chip shop what sort of oil they use.
A great crop of sunflowers is 1 tonne/acre(though it does produce more oil).

As Australians are THE most efficient growers in the world both in yield and water use efficiency, it is actually a disservice to the world by not growing cotton here. Water wasted on cotton in other countries would be better used on grain crops that they can grow efficiently.

Typical losses- deep drainage- from clay soils in cotton growing areas are in the order of 1-6mm a day. 1-6L/m2. Soil holds approx 150-200mm of moisture, but we apply at 70-90mm deficits, soil moisture probes have shown that the profile is not fully re-filled after first in-crop irrigation(no deep drainage). The cotton crop canopy usually has completely covered the rows by 2nd irrigation, negating direct evaporation losses- creating a shady microclimate.
Furrow irrigation stands up well against irrigation systems that require water to be sprayed over the crop, where our soils become to wet for the pivot/lateral move at above 40mm/application. We typically have evaporation rates of 12+mm/day. Roughly 25%application losses. Evaporation does not cease at night.

I’m not as aware of rice growing, but the soils are picked specifically for their impermiability. Despite the high evaporation, the rice growers are the most water efficient growers in the world too.

Your link to seepage rates showed a table, purporting to be a summary of the literature, that did not include the reports that showed a range of much smaller seepage rates by Dunstone 1998, ie as low as 2.4l/m2/day up to a max of 116l/m2/day. This was the actual seepage rates from existing systems while your table dealt with experimental rates from various substrates.

But even your figure of 82litres/m2/day ignores the fact that the water moves along the chanel at about 2km/hour or 48000 metres/day. And if the chanel is 1 metre deep then the total loss of water will be 48,000 times 82 litres = 3.96Kl against a total delivery of 48,000Kl, a percentage loss rate of 4/48,000 or 0.83 of 1%.

Bogan

If you weren’t so emotional about the issue, and I can’t blame you, you would see that your questions are not very good ones and are easily answered with a little rational thought.