Organised by the Irrigated Cropping Council and hosted in Moama on July 14, the Irrigated Ag Conference was a full-day event.
One of the highlights was a panel discussion by Deniliquin cotton, grain and cattle farmer Lachie Danckert, Kyabram dairy farmer Andrew Murphy and Yarrawonga cropper Evan Ryan.
The trio discussed how their own operations were adapting to the changing water environment.
An audience member asked the trio why farmers were failing to adopt new water-saving technologies, such a soil probes.
Mr Danckert said he personally saw connectivity as the big roadblock.
“It’s shocking. Connectivity is something we fail at badly in this country,” the Deniliquin and Hay farmer said.
“We’ve gone onto Elon Musk’s Starlink and it’s fantastic for delivering wi-fi. It’s great to see how many ideas the sector has to improve farming, but there is no connection.”
Mr Ryan said he didn’t struggle as much with reception and internet access because he was close to Yarrawonga.
“For us it’s a redundancy issue. Companies come and go and you can get stuck with no support,” he said.
“You spend so much to adopt these new things and it can end up in the bin within a few years. It becomes a ‘once bitten, three times shy’ situation.
“For us we tend to step back and say ‘we’ll wait for that to mature a few years’ and we stick to the big players and don’t go too exotic.”
Mr Murphy described himself as a “late adopter”.
“We wait for the neighbour to adopt it and for it to work for him before we buy into it,” he said.
Mr Ryan sits on the ICC board and said the idea of a cross-sector conference was a good one.
“The big issues are common across all of us,” he said.
“Today it seems people are really interested in discussing the uncertain future around water pricing. I found the presentation by Kilter Rural very interesting.”
Kilter Rural water general manger Matthew Bryant talked about the water market at the conference.
Mr Bryant talked about the water competition croppers and dairy farmers can expect once the horticulture plantings in the system reach maturity.
Rochester sheep and cropping farmer Andrew James attended the event.
“It’s a good networking opportunity really, you catch up with clients and meet new ones. For me I was really interested in what Dr Kenton Porker from FAR Australia said about hyper yielding crops.”
Dr Porker’s presentation talked about FAR Australia’s attempts to push the economically attainable yield boundaries of wheat, barley and canola.
ICC executive officer Charlie Aves said it had been a real ambition to bring all types of irrigators together and put together the program farmers wanted.
“So much information is delivered in silos but the issues we are facing are industry wide,” Ms Aves said.
“We really tried to tackle the bigger issues today as opposed to nutting down on specific details and I think that’s why we got so much interest.
“We are testing the waters with this conference this year because it’s not something we’ve done before.”
Ms Aves said it was clear there was more engagement when farmers talked to farmers.