Water buy-back not an option for nature-loving Riverina farmers

The family milks 1600 cows and adopts flood irrigation to produce feed and deliver life to their land.

"We've lost confidence in the water buy-back scheme," said Neville Kydd.

"For us, irrigation supports wildlife as well as pasture. When you take the water away there is so much less. During the drought the birdlife simply disappeared.

"Soil carbon on our farm goes up when it is irrigated and goes down quickly when it is not. It takes water to put carbon in the soil and that affects our environment."

Mr Kydd argues that water management, not water buybacks, are required if farmers are expected to remain as custodians of their land.

"There is plenty of water. We just need to be more clever," he says.

"We, as farmers, need to be part of the environmental system - not ostracised. We are part of country. We can help - we are the solution.

"We're doing this for the future - it's all about future generations on the land."

With three of those generations currently living on the farm and a satisfactory contract with Saputo, the enterprise uses 4000 to 5000 mega litres of Murray River water a year.

"We only use water that we can efficiently use," says Mr Kydd.

"A lot of farms in our area have closed their gates and gone. A huge number have converted to dryland cropping."

Mr Kydd says the difference between irrigated country and dryland monoculture is stark.

"You can certainly tell and it really shows up in the drought and there seems to be more and more of that now," he says.

Flood irrigated pasture, mostly rye and clover, brings in the birdlife that keeps pests under control. Harvested pasture is preserved as silage for drought supply.

Dryland monoculture cropping, on the other hand, requires chemical spray to beat the bugs.

"It is more water efficient to grow corn but that crop requires more and more chemical spray and at the end of the day it's not a complete feed," Mr Kydd says.

"We bought some dryland country to grow wheat, barley and canola and have used more chemical on those crops than we ever did in 30 years of pasture irrigation.

"Through water buybacks they are changing this area into something totally different and non productive with less wildlife.

"There are a lot of smart people who know the environment well and they just shake their head. This is crazy. We're not being clever.

"When the environment is un-balanced it enhances the problems. We are being forced into a situation to do things differently but it's not the best."

Mr Kydd said the inefficiency of South Australia's Coorong Basin was a major problem, with 84,000 ha of surface area that loses enough water in evaporation - about 10mg/ha - to grow 840,000 tonnes of irrigated rice.

"During the drought Australia was forced to import rice because it couldn't grow enough of its own," he said.

"There's massive evaporation from that basin - enough to fill one quarter or one third of the Hume dam," he says.

"In the drought they could have opened the barrage to the sea and let salt water back in - that would have fixed the acid sulphate soil problems with low water level.

"The whole thing is so unnatural. It's all about politics not about getting good environmental outcomes."

Read more: Southern lights ignite over Dubbo.

Read more: Wodonga feeder steers to $1800.