Dam tough, and it’s only getting harder

Ian Hindmarsh says the past decade of dairy farming has been harder than anything he faced during his 189-game rugby league career.

‘Raising the dam would be worth millions to me. We would get the security of having water all the time’, says Ian Hindmarsh. Picture: Renee Nowytarger

After nine tough years in the NRL, Ian Hindmarsh was ready to ­tackle the next chapter of his life as a dairy farmer.

But the former Parramatta Eel says the past decade has been harder than anything he faced during his 189-game rugby league career.

Mr Hindmarsh came to the Lachlan Valley in NSW’s central west for one reason. “We moved here for water security,” he told The Australian. Traditionally, the region gets good and steady rainfall over the year. And the Wyangala Dam, built in the 1930s, feeds the Lachlan River, and it is from the Lachlan that Mr Hindmarsh draws water to irrigate the fodder crops that feed his 550 cattle.

But the effects of the drought in the central west have been severe. Inflows into the Wyangala Dam ­totalled 1,400,000 gigalitres in 2016-17; in 2017-18, they were less than a 10th of that, 125,000GL.

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As a consequence, water in the dam has fallen to just 25 per cent capacity, and authorities cut allocations on the Lachlan for what’s known as general security irrigation licences to zero last year, and zero again this year.

That means Mr Hindmarsh — whose brother Nathan has carved out a high-profile media career after his NRL retirement — can draw no water from the ­Lachlan on the basis of his irrigation ­licences. The 42-year-old is buying some water on the tradeable secondary market just to nurse his winter crops into spring, but said the cost was punitive, at $500 a megalitre.

Come summer, if it doesn’t rain, the evaporation rate will be such that financially it won’t be worth growing anything.

“My plan is we won’t grow any corn, silage or lucerne,” Mr Hindmarsh said. “In six weeks, if we don’t get some good rain, we’ll be buying all our feed.”

Buying feed would sap what profit he gets from his $2.5 million annual turnover of milk sales, which because of low milk prices has not been all that great ­anyway.

“We’ve made bugger-all profit for the last 10 years,” he said.

For years, there has been talk about building big water infrastructure projects to assure more water for the region, but no ­action.

For a time, the state government looked at building a dam on the Belubula River, which feeds into the Lachlan, at Cranky Rock.

Last year, the then NSW water minister Niall Blair said that idea had been abandoned because Cranky Rock was in the too-hard basket. “My fear is it would be tied up in green and red tape for many years and we wouldn’t see ­anything flowing through to the community,” he said.

The NSW Greens and local environmental activists cracked open the champagne — they had campaigned against the proposal because the dam would flood the nearby Cliefden Caves, which ­include a rare thermal spring and house 15 confirmed species of ­microbats.

Mr Blair said the state government would instead raise the height of the Wyangala Dam by 10m, which would increase its ­capacity by 50 per cent.

For irrigation farmers like Mr Hindmarsh, it would mean all the difference in the world.

“Raising the dam would be worth millions to me,” he said.

“We would get the security of having water all the time.”

The project would not be cheap: $650m.

As yet, there does not seem to be any green activist opposition to the proposal to raise Wyangala dam, except among state public servants.

“There are those in the ­bureaucracy who do not want dams built,” NSW Water Minister Melinda Pavey said in a speech to farmers last month.

When she took over the portfolio and mooted the raising of Wyangala Dam with her departmental officers, she was told it was “not a priority”.

“Briefing notes from my ­department did not mention the ‘dam’ word,” she told the farmers.

Ms Pavey insists that raising ­Wyangala — a campaign commitment at the last election — is a priority, and that she will make it happen.

But that’s not to say it’s going to be fast: with statutory federal and state environmental ­approval processes, the best Ms Pavey hopes to achieve is to have tenders let three years from now.