The National Program for Sustainable Irrigation was a unique collaboration as it involved governments, irrigators, water providers and researchers from across Australia. It covered every aspect of irrigation from dam management and water delivery, through on-farm management, to sustainable landscape environmental measures

* Irrigation Futures in the Goulburn-Broken* Partner profile - Goulburn Murray Water * CRC for Irrigation Futures * Climate software giveaway * Project summaries

The 'Ready Reckoner' is a model which performs a simple, site-specific economic assessment of the viability of evaporation mitigation systems. The user enters appropriate data to customise the Ready Reckoner' to their site. The Ready Reckoner' returns the volume of water saved (in ML) and the cost of the evaporation mitigation system used to save this water ($/ML/year). The Ready Reckoner' was developed as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for ease of use and portability. This reference manual was developed to assist the user in the operation of the 'Ready Reckoner'.

National Program for Sustainable irrigation (NPSI) has established an Ecological Risk Assessment Project (ERA), the overall objective of which is to develop a generic framework for assessing the ecological risks associated with Australian irrigation systems. This new decision support tool should help the Australian irrigation industry quantify and prioritise the ecological risks from their activities, and better focus management actions to minimise these risks. This information should also provide ways for regulatory authorities (such as environment protection authorities) to better determine what needs protection and to use this as the basis for licensing and monitoring requirements

Irrigated farm businesses currently face a number of problems--reduced water allocations and river flows, increased climate variability, and economic pressures. In order to remain profitable and increase the productivity of water supplies, urgent action is required.

* Confidence in reclaimed water * Addressing the silent time bomb - researchers look at how to combat the build up of salinity around the rootzone * About the NPSI Knowledge base * Open Hydroponics- A new approach to intensive orchard management

Evaporation reduction from farm dams in Australia is regarded as one of the few areas where there are real water savings to be made. At this stage, there are a number of commercial evaporation reduction systems available that use either a hard or polymer cover. Currently these systems are deemed to be viable (M. Durack pers. comm., 2004) for high value crops such as table grapes but are generally not financially viable for lower value crops such as sorghum or cotton. The Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Queensland (NR&M) has invested $650,000 to test a number of evaporation systems. There is likely to be other private and public research occurring. The Sustainable Irrigation Program requested the following question be scoped: Are there any areas of research that Sustainable Irrigation can invest in that will provide a quantum leap in the development and introduction of systems that will reduce evaporation by at least 80% that areaffordable for medium value commodities such as cotton and grains crops

The Virginia Pipeline Scheme (VPS) is the largest scheme of its type in Australia (SA Water 2005; EarthTech 2005) and was established in 1999 to deliver unrestricted Class A reclaimed water to irrigators on the Northern Adelaide Plains (NAP) in South Australia. The purpose of this research was to investigate and report on the various stakeholder perceptions of reclaimed water used in the VPS from its development and operation up to the present. The results will feed back into a larger study on the use of reclaimed effluent water in Australian Horticulture (Boland 2004a; Boland 2004b) and the communications project Coordinator for Recycled Water Development Horticulture (CRWDH, 2005). The objectives of the study were to: (i) review the key issues associated with a scheme that has been running for 5 years and learn from these in the application to other schemes (ii) understand the current communication deficiencies with the view to assessing the impact of current activities in the future.