From humble beginings in the 1880s by individual farmers along inland rivers and, in particular, the efforts of the Chaffey brothers at Renmark and Mildura in 1887, the irrigation industries in Australia have expanded to where they now use three quarters of all water used, have a combined area of about 2.6 million hectares under irrigation and produce agricultural outputs worth over $9 billion. Irrigation industries are an integral part of many regional economies and the national economy, and, on one