Thread: The Darling river fish kill.

Originally Posted by JDNSW

In Australia, water courses named rivers usually are named that because the person naming it thought it looked like a river when it was first seen. They are usually not going to hold off on naming it for a couple of years to see what it is like in a bad season. And if you have walked a few hundred kilometres across the

And I am sure you are well aware that the Thompson River merges with the Barcoo River to form Coopers Creek.

According to Wikipedia the Darling dried up forty-five times between 1885 and 1960.

My local river, the Talbragar, is now completely dry where I cross it, although there are still a few mudholes along it. I am not sure any of them near here are big enough to still have fish in. There is no significant irrigation upstream from here.

I'm reminded of when I was first working near Aramac in the early sixties. Some of our blokes took a local hire back to Brisbane with them on a field break. He was reported to have looked down in wonder at the size of the Brisbane river from Victoria Bridge - and turned and asked "Does it stop flowing in the dry season?".

Yes, John. Well aware of that. The Western River at Winton is not deserving of the tag "river" either. although when it had water in it and if you could push all its multiple channels together it would be a fair stream. There is a spot on a back road where a single lane road crosses the Barcoo River on a single lane wooden bridge. The Barcoo River there is barely 20' wide. I wonder what your Aramac guy would think of the Mississippi?

Just because a river has dried up occasionally doesn't let the current regulators off the hook. The river system no longer has natural flows - they have been altered too much.
The only answer is to take less water and let the flows return closer to natural.

Originally Posted by PhilipA

Cotton likes low humidity and places like Moree are ideal for cotton. There is also quite a bit of dryland cotton grown around Narrabri and Wee Waa when the soil profile is full.

A lot of research has been made into reducing the water level in paddies to grow rice as 25MM of water height means a saving of 10% of total water. NSW ag has been working for years on this.

So what are we to do? Say to farmers that they can no longer grow rice? There are thousands of immigrant ( lots of Italians among them) families in the Riverina who have grown rice for decades . Rice is predominantly a small holder crop and sold to and through Ricegrowers Coop. They started their farms in good faith that they would be given a water allocation. Griffith was built of rice but now has diversified to wine to some extent. It is the availability of water that opened up the area and now hundreds of thousands of people live there and depend on water. Without water it is a desert.
You might as well say that hey we don't need citrus either as it depends on water in NSW and in SA. Again these are mainly small holdings with many amalgamated soldier settlement properties.

Really some areas that cotton grows in are unsuitable for other crops. I once visited Lake Wyangan area where a bloke was trying to grow onions for export. He had 3 days at 47C and all the onions cooked in the ground despite having his pivot on. Cotton thrives in that sort of heat.

I was personally involved in trying to convert cotton growers in Moree to grow other crops, and the ideal one in oranges. The area has more sun units than anywhere else and the oranges would be fabulous. However when you tell an annual cropper like a cotton grower that he has to wait 5 years to get a crop, they walk away as none of them have the financial depth to become a horticulturist.

It's easy to say but the eggs were broken many years ago.

Regards Philip A

So we keep on breaking them? I think not. WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Water allocations have to be renegotiated if it means a FAIR distribution of a limited resource.

This is the problem, water is not infinite. Our local river (Peel, a Namoi tributary and therefore part of the Darling) has a dam (Chaffey) which supplies Tamworth with drinking water and local lucerne growers with irrigation water and tops up Keepit which at this time is essentially dry. Chaffey is now at 35% and Tamworth council has only just introduced water restrictions for the town. Bear in mind people pump tens of gigalitres of potable water onto bloody grass, so they can mow and flush huge amounts of potable water down the toilet. I hope you see where I'm coming from ie we should be recycling waste water for these purposes and use the potable water for drinking. We'll save a **** load of water this way and yes, unfortunately it will cost water users money, but such is the way of progress. And no, I am not one of these users as we survive on tank water so we don't WASTE.

You mention the Murrumbidgee. Yes it's part of the system but probably more sustainable due to it being supplied by snow melt and not sourced from arid lands. Suffice to say, Riverina water users must learn to survive with less and this is happening with better irrigation methods. But, where citrus uses quite a lot of water, there are now more and more almond farms coming on stream which, according to farmers in the district that I've spoken to, use up to 4 times the water that citrus uses. This type of use is not sustainable. Allocations throughout the whole M/D system have to be reduced.

I don't pretend to have all the answers and anyone who thinks they do is lying. But we can and must do better.

I don’t see why they can’t work with desalination plants,, put a few in various locations and pump it out to the farms etc.
Yes, expensive, but think of all the jobs created in the process ,,, and maybe we could leave our rivers alone.
To some this would seem impossible due to various reasons,,, it’s only limited by an unwillingness to explore and have a go.

Murray-Darling Basin damage done, we must now restore trust in its management - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Among the more sensational findings of the Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission was that the authority responsible for administering the plan acted unlawfully and failed to use the best available science, including climate science.

Here is what an industry insider says.

Have you any idea of the energy used by desalination plants? (Around 5 Megawatt-hours per megalitre - irrigation needs a lot of megalitres) Think about this against the background of soaring energy costs and a need to decarbonise energy supply.

irrigation needs a lot of megalitres

This is Precisely why they shouldn't be allowed to "Rape" the river, They need to find another way to farm.
Here in the West irrigation is rare except at Kununurra most likely because we don't have the river systems that the Eastern states do and our farmers do rather well and prosper because they are bloody good at dry land farming.

The determination of a waterway as a “river” or otherwise is a distraction and irrelevant. When you need ( not want) potable water how is its source, river or tributary, pertinent?
The contents are the relevant factor.
The contents are limited.
The contents are vital to the environment and the people.
Nobody with a spark of intelligence denies this.
Some simple facts though, Cotton and Rice won’t/should not be grown here in the quantity demanded.
We are misunderstanding our need ( sustainable, responsible, necessary production) vs greed, (production targets set by markets, shareholders) rather than seasonal variations and actual conditions.
The farms are not family farms. They are owned or operated by big business making big profits with no interest in sustainability.
Their justification is the jobs for the area and economy and their large bank accounts sway political weakness the world over.
Ruins of towns throughout Australia serve as no reminder that, when a resource, any resource, is gone so too is the economy.
These farms/properties were not here 50 years ago, neither was the demand on the resources.
The Port of Bourke, now commonly known as Bourke, mentioned earlier, had paddle wheelers traversing carrying wool.
We know rivers run dry, yet if anything close to water flows natural for the system, were flowing, then it would still be possible to run a shallow draft vessel all the way up or down the river.
But you can’t.
High water use crops in the lowest rainfall areas- do we really need environmental scientists and dare I say another royal commission to see that it isn’t smart?

Off topic, this is why humans will never successfully expand beyond Earth.
They can’t take care of the most amazing life giving space Vehicle now.
Any vessel made will have profitability study attached and the cycle will go on. That’s if humans even manage to arrive somewhere Earth like before consuming their new artificial life giving vessel.

Bit of a rant sorry