Murray Darling Floodplain harvest to be licenced: Border Rivers rollout

Work has begun on licensing flood-plain harvesting in the Border Rivers Region of NSW, the first in the state to do so.

When floods hit the NSW Border region, local irrigators say their harvest of water into on-farm storages is “inconsequential”.

THE NSW Government has started consultation on licensing flood-plain harvesting under its Border Rivers water sharing plan, with a proposal allowing irrigators to harvest up to five times the 43,000 megalitres of water shares they are about to be granted.

“The proposed rules for flood-plain harvesting set an account limit of 5 megalitres per unit share at any time, plus unlimited a carry-over,” the consultation paper states.

But the region’s irrigators will still have to stay within the long-term average annual extraction limit of 43,000ML.

If the long-term average annual extraction limit has been exceeded by 3 per cent, then “flood-plain harvesting access licences will be reduced to respond to the exceedence”.

Border Rivers Food and Fibre executive officer Tim Napier said critics of flood-plain harvesting needed to understand the region’s irrigators need rules that allowed them to harvest variable river and flood-plain flows, given they enjoyed just “two good years in seven”.

“In a flood the amount of water that’s taken by flood-plain harvesting is inconsequential,” he said. “Overall it comes up to about 20 per cent of the extracted water (long-term average take).”

But Mr Napier admitted he was yet to see an official report that gave an accurate picture of the flood-plain harvesting across the northern Murray Darling Basin.

The NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment’s modelling estimated the long-term average annual take from flood-plain harvesting on the Border Rivers system has grown to 49,400ML, well above the Murray Darling Basin Plan cap of 42,700ML.

“The results show distinct growth in flood-plain harvesting (over-bank flow and rainfall run-off harvesting),” the NSW DPIE consultation paper stated.

“This growth will be managed through the licensing framework and associated application of account management and extraction limit compliance rules.”

But irrigators in the Southern Murray Darling Basin are still insistent that all flood-plain harvesting is illegal, as it has never been licensed.

Southern Riverina Irrigators chairman Chris Brooks said his group would take the NSW Government “to task” on the issue.