Murray Darling Basin boom: irrigators “going flat out”

A wet summer and low water usage have left the basin’s biggest dams ready to underwrite a boom 2023-24 irrigation season.

Murray irrigators’ allocations for 2023-24 are backed by the 6.7 million megalitres sitting in Dartmouth (pictured) and Hume dams.

The Murray Darling Basin is primed for a record 2023-24 irrigation season with storages at 95 per cent capacity, holding the equivalent 22.2 million megalitres of water or 44 times the volume of Sydney Harbour.

A wet summer, ongoing dam inflows and low water usage have left the basin’s biggest dams – Dartmouth, Hume and Eildon – sitting well above 97 per cent capacity, with 9.895 million megalitres of active storage on hand.

Water register usage reports show, once net trade and write-offs due to spills are taken into account, Victorian Murray irrigators still have a million of the 1.2m megalitres they were allocated this season, with similar low usage in the Goulburn, NSW Murray and Murrumbidgee valleys.

Water is selling on the Goulburn and Murray temporary markets for as little as $5/ML to $10/ML, a fraction of the drought driven $940/ML high it reached in the spring of 2019.

Northern Victoria’s Resource Manager has already forecast it’s most likely the 2023-24 season will open on July 3 with the state’s Murray irrigators’ allocations at 100 per cent and those on the Goulburn at 92 per cent.

Even if dam inflows fell back to a one-in-100-year dribble, the NVRM reports there is enough water in the system to deliver close to 80 per cent of allocations next season.

National Irrigators Council chairman Jeremy Morton said: “Everyone has their ears pinned back … going flat out preparing irrigation paddocks for winter or summer crop production.”

As a Moulamein irrigator on the NSW Murray Irrigation Limited system, Mr Morton said he had not used any water until December.

Water NSW usage dashboard shows the MIL irrigators still have 2 million megalitres on hand, of which 50 per cent can be carried over into next season, while the rest rolls over into new allocations.

But while irrigators are banking on a boom year, brokers report clients are snapping up cheap water now to secure supplies for the next two seasons.

Climate model runs by US and Japanese government agencies are already forecasting an El Nino and positive Indian Ocean Dipole will rear their heads by July, which is prompting irrigators to secure supplies into 2024-25.

Australian Water Brokers Association president Andrew Martin and H2OX chief executive Lex Batters said clients were paying $80 to $125 to park water on others’ Goulburn or Murray low reliability water shares.

The strategy means irrigators can use the parked water early in the season while stockpiling further allocations against their own entitlements for 2024-25.

Mr Martin said the price of forward contracts was always a reasonable indication of where prices would head in the new season, which are sitting at $120/ML on the Murrumbidgee and $130 to $150 on the Murray River’s below choke zone.

He said the season could turn very quickly, as occurred after the basin was saturated for the first nine months of 2016-17, after which the tap was turned off.

“From water everywhere to ‘bloody hell’, it’s drought and prices turned quickly,” Mr Martin said.