Adopting improved use of current water monitoring technology to manage recharge

Product Information

Rising watertables are a major threat to the sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the southern Murray-Darling Basin. Future sustainability will depend on the ability of each irrigation farmer to choose paddock-crop-irrigation management combinations that control impacts on watertables on their farm. There is a perception that the technology already exists to enable farmers to manage water sustainably, and that the problem is one of adoption rather than the development of new technology. However, farmers usually have good reasons for doing what they do, and the challenge for both farmers and researchers is to develop technologies that farmers want and can adopt, and which move towards more sustainable farming practices.

The goal of this project was to determine a process for successful technology transfer and adoption at a pilot scale, in relation to attempting to identify and evaluate technologies to enable farmers to make informed decisions that impact on net recharge and water use efficiency. Maximum emphasis was placed on the use of participative processes to try to ensure that the research and its outcomes were relevant, adoptable, wanted and owned by the farming community.

A range of approaches was used, including consultation with a large cross section of the farming community - to find out the things that were most important to them for their futures as irrigation farmers, to increase contact between researchers and community members, and to increase community awareness. Following this, a small group of farmers worked jointly with the researchers to evaluate methods for determining the fate of water applied to crops, at the paddock scale.