Drought creates thirst for hi-tech farming

Nov 2, 2007, 10:10 GMT

Sydney - The Murray-Darling basin in the south-east corner is home to around half Australia's 130,000 farming families.

It's the nation's food bowl and where many poor immigrants from the hardscrabble lands of Italy and other southern European countries learned to till strange soils, cope with droughts and floods, and set up orchards and vineyards.

The worst drought in 100 years is testing the skills of the descendents of the pioneers who journeyed north from Melbourne to open up land that is fruitful only through irrigation schemes.

The big dry has put a quarter of farming families on some form of government assistance. The bill for propping up farmers is running at 2 million Australian dollars (1.7 million US dollars) a week.

Most Murray-Darling farmers won't get an allocation of water for their irrigation schemes this year. The rivers of the Murray-Darling, which accounts for one-third of agricultural production and three-quarters of irrigated acreage, are running dry.

Ben Fargher, chief executive of the National Farmers Federation, said turning off the tap would force more farmers off the land and drive down production. Last season's grape harvest was down by one-third.

'Thousands of farmers will be seriously impacted but we're not saying today that thousands of producers will necessarily be leaving their properties,' Fargher said. 'They're resilient innovative people, we are much better able to manage risk, but the current drought is really putting us under a significant amount of pressure.'

Fruit grower Ross Costa, whose grandfather arrived from Italy and set up the family's 60-hectare orchard near Shepparton, is proving both resilient and innovative.

His fruit trees thrive on bore water. It's costly to drill for water, but it's the only way to stay in business.

'That's water coming out of the ground and we switch the motors on and it irrigates the orchard,' Costa told national broadcaster ABC. 'That's liquid gold you can hear.'

Shepparton, a town of 40,000 people 180 kilometres north of Melbourne, is in the heart of orchard country.

Before the drought bit seven years ago Costa's big concern was finding enough workers to harvest his fruit. Now, there are a multitude of other concerns - all of which are testing his skills.

A severe winter frost can kill his fruit, so he's rigged up what are called frost fans that start up automatically when the temperature plummets. He also has what's called a hail cannon, which uses a sonic boom to bombard hailstones so they break up and are less damaging to fruit.

Costa also prunes the trees after growing starts so the harvested fruit is large - the size the big supermarkets like it.

But it's access to water, and more especially the cost of buying water allocations, that is crucial to keeping the Costa tradition going.

Further north in Griffith, a five-hour drive from Melbourne, George Nolan has not grown rice for two years because his water allocation has been stopped. The family farm is now reliant on the grape harvest. They sell to De Bortoli Wines, run by third-generation Italian Darren De Bortoli, and one of Australia's finest winemakers.

'We are not too bad compared with others around Griffith,' Nolan said. 'Some haven't had rain for six years.'

Griffith, home to 23,000, is one of many inland towns struggling to survive the drought. It's in an area that in 1817, before irrigation systems were put in, was described by explorer John Oxley as 'uninhabitable and useless to civilized man.'