Rural water use efficiency, a major key to increase production and reduce the burden on our valuable water resource

Abstract

The "Dairy and Lucerne (Alfalfa) Adoption Program" of the Queensland Rural Water Use Efficiency Initiative (RWUEI) is targeting five major dairy and three major lucerne irrigation regions in the state with the objective to develop better irrigation water use efficiency (WUE) through the adoption of best management practices in irrigation. The major beneficiaries of the program will be industries, irrigators and local communities. The benefits will flow via two avenues: increased production and profit resulting from improved WUE and improved environmental health. As a added result, the work is likely to contribute to an improved public image of the dairy and lucerne industries. In each of the regions, WUE officers have established grower groups to assist in providing local input into the specific objectives of extension and demonstration activities. The groups also assist in developing grower's perceptions of ownership of the work. Extension activities are based around on-farm demonstration sites in each region where irrigation management techniques and hardware are showcased. A key theme of the program is monitoring and scheduling of water use. Due to vast distances covered by the project this has meant introducing new remote monitoring technologies to farmers. This is applied both to on-farm storage, pumping and distribution as well as to application methods and in-field management.