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Spare a thought for the region’s irrigators.
While house-proud locals despair over the impact of Level 2 water restrictions on their yards, irrigators are facing a far harsher reality – no water at all.
Almost a third of the way through the season and Peel River irrigation farms are sitting at zero per cent of allocations.
Summer crops are already a write-off and permanent plantings are being slowly baked alive.
The prospects of the season ending as it started – with nothing – are both terrifying and real.
The only circuit-breaker is rain – and lots of it.
For any meaningful inflows into Chaffey, the parched catchment areas must be softened up by a soaking and then receive substantial follow-up rain.
Dry area farmers, of course, are just as high and dry.
But irrigators have the double indignity of having to pay for the water they’re unlikely to receive.
In the Peel, irrigators are slugged more than $5 per megalitre of allocation in entitlement fees even if they don’t get a drop, about double the cost of their Murrumbidgee counterparts.
Add to this the state government’s plan to dramatically increase the cost of water under its flawed new cost recovery model and the future of irrigation in the Peel is looking shakier by the day.
This is not just an issue for the farming sector either.
Less agricultural production means less jobs and less money for the entire local economy.
This month’s announcement irrigation supply company Water Dynamics would close in Tamworth is yet another portentous sign.
As Peel Valley Water Users president Ildu Montecone rightly points out, farmers are a resilient lot.
And there is always some reason to be hopeful, not the least the current work to expand Chaffey Dam.
But as it stands, irrigation in the Peel is being consigned to a slow death and it seems neither the government, nor Mother Nature, are too concerned.