Welcome to the November 2004 edition of INFLO from the CRC for Irrigation Futures.
INFLO is primarily written for CRC-IF researchers, partners, students and stakeholders as a communication tool within this diverse organisation. We welcome information about your projects, research, zones and upcoming events. Please email any information to
Sally MacKinnon the CRC’s Communication Manager at sally.mackinnon@irrigationfutures.org.au
or safehaven@austarnet.com.au
We thank Jeremy Cape who has been the editor of INFLO since its inception. Jeremy will continue to be involved in the CRC’s work.
IN THIS ISSUE
Urban Irrigation Workshop The CRC hosted the first national forum on urban
irrigation in Sydney on October 27 and 28
Knowledge Exchange Team
The CRC’s Knowledge Exchange Team is up-and-running with a Knowledge Exchange Manager, Education Manager and Communication
Manager…
INFLO Survey
How can we make INFLO a “really useful” communication tool for the
CRC? Have your say…
Website Review
We’re updating the CRC website and want to know about your ideas and needs…
CRC-IF Annual Conference Summary and Papers
Have you submitted your conference material from September? Would you like a copy of the summary?
CRC-IF Annual Report
Now available…
Sustainability Challenge Planning Workshop
This TBL tool is being developed for the irrigation industry by a multi-disciplinary team within the CRC-IF. Planning workshop in
Sydney in November…
Goondiwindi Event – Innovations in Agriculture
This exciting event was held in
October and had approximately 250 attendees…
ANCID Annual Conference 2004
The ANCID Annual Conference was held in South
Australia between October 10 and 13…
John Langford is the CRC’s Visiting Fellow and recently came to our Toowoomba
office as part of his first review of our operations…
Guardian Article – Plunder Down Under presents a range of confronting statistics
about irrigated agriculture in Australia
Important Dates
CRC-IF Contacts

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The CRC-IF hosted the first national forum on urban irrigation in Sydney on October 27 and 28. Organised by Basant Maheshwari (UWS) and Geoff Connellan (Uni of
Melbourne), the workshop was the first time the diverse stakeholders within the urban irrigation sector have come together. They discussed key issues such as the impact of outdoor water restrictions on industry, peri-urban horticulture, nursery and garden retailers, households and the visual aesthetics and amenity of Australian towns and cities.
Networking and relationship building were a vital part of the forum and water authority representatives worked with irrigation manufacturers and suppliers, horticultural industry stakeholders and members of the nursery and garden sector to identify high-priority R&D needs.
The forum aimed to take participants beyond water restrictions to potentially more effective and sustainable solutions in outdoor water use in urban areas.
A committee made up of state government, local government and water authority, CRC-
IF, WSAA, IAA and industry representation has been formed to identify ways forward in addressing this important irrigation issue.
The CRC is pleased to announce its employment of the Knowledge Exchange Team which will support internal R&D work and disseminate outcomes to industry and government in particular. The KET team is:
Kelvin Montagu – Knowledge Exchange Manager. Kelvin is based in Sydney and his email address is kelvinm@sf.nsw.gov.au
Andrew Sanderson – Education Manager. Andrew is based in Bathurst and his email address is andrew.sanderson@agric.nsw.gov.au
Sally MacKinnon – Communication Manager. Sally is based at Beechmont in South East
Queensland. Her email address is sally.mackinnon@irrigationfutures.org.au
or safehaven@austarnet.com.au
The KET meets for the first time in late November to develop its strategic plan and upcoming activities. We’ll keep you posted about its operations and how they will

3 support the operations of the CRC. In the meantime, feel free to contact Kelvin, Andrew or Sally to introduce yourself and your work.
We’re reviewing INFLO to create a newsletter that is a “really useful” communication tool for the CRC-IF.
We’d like to launch a refocused INFLO in early 2005 so it’s time to hear your views about our newsletter NOW.
What is the best way to capture stories from around the CRC?
We’d like to have monthly input from each Zone, each Program and each major project – how can we do this?
Contact Communication Manager Sally MacKinnon at: sally.mackinnon@irrigationfutures.org.au
or safehaven@austarnet.com.au
today, to give her your ideas about INFLO and how to capture CRC news from around Australia.
We’re updating the CRC website for 2005, to create a comprehensive communication tool for internal and external use. Our immediate focus is on internal communication via the posting of research reports and outcomes, and encouraging conversation between researchers, projects, zones and CRC partners.
What would you like the website to do? How do you want to use the website?
Forward your needs and ideas to Sally MacKinnon at: sally.mackinnon@irrigationfutures.org.au
or safehaven@austarnet.com.au
Conference papers from the CRC’s Annual Conference are now being collated – have you submitted yours to Sonya Krenske so we can produce a Conference Summary?
Please forward your conference papers or summaries now to Sonya at sonya.krenske@irrigationfutures.org.au
Contact Sonya or Sally to register your interest in obtaining the summary when it has been collated: sonya.krenske@irrigationfutures.org.au
or sally.mackinnon@irrigationfutures.org.au
or safehaven@austarnet.com.au

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The CRC’s 2003-04 Annual Report will be available from the end of November. Contact
Sonya if you would like a copy straight away, otherwise a hard copy will be mailed to your organisation in due course.
The Sustainability Challenge is a CRC project which aims to develop the tools and information to challenge the Australian irrigation community to develop and use regular
TBL report cards on its sustainability at urban, farm, region, catchment and national levels.
The project is a multidisciplinary and multiparty approach and includes 15 researchers from seven different organisations. A planning workshop was held in Sydney on
November 17 and 18 which brought together most of the personnel involved in this exciting project.
The ultimate goal of the project team is to establish the measurement tools, monitoring systems, analysis framework and interactive communication networks which will enable irrigation communities to reach a shared understanding of their current performance against a set of holistic TBL sustainability indicators and to use this knowledge to create a sustainability vision for the future.
Contact Project Leader Evan Christen for more information: Evan.Christen@csiro.au
Around 250 irrigators from as far away as Hillston in central NSW and Bundaberg in
Queensland converged at Goondiwindi on October 21 and 22 for the IAA’s two-day event “Innovations in Irrigated Agriculture.”
The North West NSW and Darling Downs branches of the IAA joined Border Rivers
Food and Fibre, Australian Cotton Outlook, the Queensland Murray Darling Committee and the NSW and Queensland Departments of Primary Industries to support the seminar, which showcased best practice in water use and on-farm natural resource management.
Inspections and presentations at the event included:

Best practice surface irrigation

Alternative irrigation systems

Lateral move and centre pivot irrigators

Storage evaporation monitoring

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
Storage efficiency

Soil moisture monitoring, and

Subsurface and above-ground drip irrigation.
The CRC IF was represented in force with Peter Smith, Summer Zone Leader the key organiser for the event. Presentations were also made by Joseph Foley, David Wigginton of the NCEA, with Matthew Durack, Rick Darroch and Andrew Sanderson there to ask the hard questions.
The ANCID 2004 Annual Conference was held between October 10 and 13 and uniquely, was a travelling event incorporating field trips, presentations and a public debate. Of particular interest to the CRC was the session focused on irrigation innovations.
Speakers representing the CRC IF included Matthew Durack, Imogen Fullagar, and
Shahbaz Khan. For more information about the conference outcomes contact Matthew
Durack at durackm@irrigationfutures.org.au
or mailto:durackm@usq.edu.au
– or visit the
ANCID Website at mailto:http://ancid.org.au
Professor John Langford, Director of the Melbourne Water Research Centre at the
University of Melbourne and previously Executive Director of WSAA and the Chairman of the CRC for Freshwater Ecology, is the CRC-IF’s official Visitor – the
Commonwealth Government’s specialist representative who will review and ‘mentor’ our operations.
John made his first visit to the CRC’s Toowoomba office on October 14 and will discuss his review of our first year of operations at the SMG on November 16. He has identified that the critical issue for the CRC in future is focus, focus, focus.
John has vast experience both within the Australian water industry and the water-based
CRC community and we look forward to working with him during the CRC’s life.
On Monday November 8, the Guardian ran an article by journalist David Fickling which presented some eye-opening and confronting statistics about irrigated agriculture in
Australia. He commends households for beginning to address their water use but condemns the levels of irrigated water used in many agricultural sectors. Here are a few thought-provoking quotes from the article…
“…domestic water usage has increased by 500,000 gigalitres since the late 1960s, but the water diverted for agriculture has gone up by 10m gigalitres – 20 times the amount allocated to households.”

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“One way of measuring the efficiency of water usage is to work out how much of the resource you need for a dollar’s worth of finished product. On this measure, healthcare and education use seven litres of water for each Australian dollar (40p), banking uses nine litres, and most manufacturing comes in at less than 50 litres.
Irrigated agriculture consumes scales of magnitude more water. It takes 1,200 litres to make a dollar’s-worth of sugar and 1,500 litres to make dairy products or cotton to the same value. The most thirst crop is rice, which consumes 7,500 litres of water for every dollar of value.”
“…rice on its own uses 2,000 gigalitres of the Murray each year, and Australia’s cotton growers who are also mainly based around the Murray, use 2,900 gigalitres of water each year. That last figure is equivalent to 18 times the amount of water used by the UK’s entire irrigated agriculture industry.
How can a country that cries water poor continue to consume it in this manner? How can a country with one-third of the population of the UK use nearly 100 times as much water on irrigated farming and then lay the blame on householders for their bathroom habits?”
To read the full article go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1346106,00.html

SMG meeting in Sydney - November 16 - Contact Sonya Krenske: sonya.krenske@irrigationfutures.org.au

Sustainability Challenge Meeting - November 17 and 18 in Sydney - Contact
Evan Christen: Evan.Christen@csiro.au

Urban Irrigation Sub Committee Teleconference – November 22 - Contact
Matthew Durack: durackm@irrigationfutures.org.au
or durackm@usq.edu.au

KET Planning Meeting – November 23-25 – Contact Kelvin Montagu: kelvinm@sf.nsw.gov.au

Final Board Meeting for 2004 – December 13 – Contact Matthew Durack: durackm@irrigationfutures.org.au
or durackm@usq.edu.au

Urban Irrigation Sub Committee Teleconference – December 20 - Contact
Matthew Durack: durackm@irrigationfutures.org.au
or durackm@usq.edu.au

Urban Irrigation Meeting – January 21 in Sydney - Contact Matthew Durack: durackm@irrigationfutures.org.au
or durackm@usq.edu.au
Chief Executive Officer: Matthew Durack
Business Manager: Rick Darroch durackm@irrigationfutures.org.au
or durackm@usq.edu.au
darrochr@irrigationfutures.org.au

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Admin Coordinator: Sonya Krenske sonya.krenske@irrigationfutures.org.au
Knowledge Exchange Manager: Kelvin Montagu kelvinm@sf.nsw.gov.au
Education Manager: Andrew Sanderson andrew.sanderson@agric.nsw.gov.au
Communication Manager: Sally MacKinnon
Senior Management Team :
Chief Scientist:
Wayne Meyer
Program Leaders: sally.mackinnon@irrigationfutures.org.au
or safehaven@austarnet.com.au
wayne.meyer@csiro.au
Sustainability
Shabaz Khan
Policy and Planning for Change
Allan Dale
Technology and Practice
Steve Raine
Education and Training
Hector Malano (Education)
Eddie Par (Training)
Shabaz.Khan@csiro.au
allan.dale@nrm.qld.gov.au
raine@usq.edu.au
h.malano@devtech.unimelb.edu.au eddie.parr@agric.nsw.gov.au
Zone Leaders:
Urban
Basant Maheshwari
Summer
Peter Smith
Erik Schmidt b.maheshwarie@uws.edu.au
peter.smith@agric.nsw.gov.au
Tropical
Keith Bristow
Phillip Charlesworth keith.bristow@csiro.au
Winter
QJ Wang
G Schrale qj.wang@nre.vic.gov.au
Schrale.Gerrit@saugov.sa.gov.au
Sue Saunders sue.saunders@csiro.au
This e-newsletter was compiled by the CRC for Irrigation Futures. You have received this email newsletter as you are part of the CRC Irrigation Futures team. If you do not wish to receive further editions please reply to this email with unsubscribe in the subject line.