Irrigator water usage hits new low: leaves storages primed for 2023-24

Murray Darling Basin irrigators have used almost no water this season, leaving storages primed to deliver high 2023-24 allocations.

Murray River storages are full and able to deliver water well into the 2023-24 irrigation season.

Irrigators have hardly touched their massive Murray Darling Basin water reserves as they head into summer, with much of the water expected to be carried over into the 2023-24 season.

Victoria’s Northern Resource Manager has already squirrelled away 3001 gigalitres to meet 2023-24 commitments on the Murray system and 1714GL on the Goulburn.

The Victorian Water Register showed, that as of Monday the state’s Murray irrigators had used just 65GL of the 1226GL they held in Dartmouth, Hume and Lake Victoria.

On the Goulburn system irrigators had used 36GL of the 1098GL they had in storage.

It has been a similar story in flood soaked southern NSW, where the Murrumbidgee irrigators have used just 23GL of the 2284GL they have in storage, while those in the state’s Murray system have tapped just 62GL of their 2295GL reserve.

But ironically NSW general security allocations may be low in 2023-24, due to low demand and draw down of storages, leaving little room to store more inflows – especially in the Murrumbidgee.

Aither water analyst Chris Olszak said “the challenge for irrigators going into next season is finding carryover parking space that doesn’t have a high risk of spill”.

Victorian Murray irrigators have already written off 389GL due to spills, while those on the Goulburn have lost a staggering 533GL. However that loss has been more than offset by allocations of 100 per cent on their high reliability and low reliability water shares on the Murray and close to that on the Goulburn.

While US and Japanese climate models point to the emergence of an El Nino next year, Mr Olszak said he had been telling clients that 2023-24 was “going to be another good year of low allocation prices”.

He said demand was not only down due to wet weather, but also simply due to farmers being unable to plant summer crops in rain soaked or flooded paddocks.

“There’s not a big drawdown, so we’re going into next season with full storages and a good chance of very high allocations.”

Meanwhile Basin catchments are primed to deliver even more water over summer, as the long tail of recent La Nina driven floods pushes 155GL a day down the Darling River at Bourke and 211GL/day downstream of Euston Weir on the Murray River.