Resources

• Irrigation Codes and Standards
  The Irrigation Association of Australia web site provides a listing of relevant Australian, New Zealand and International irrigation standards.
• Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Rice Production
  The funding for this cooperative research centre has now concluded, however you can still access many of the materials developed by the CRC online.

• National Program for Sustainable Irrigation – Knowledge Base
  The Australian National Program for Sustainable Irrigation focuses research on the development and adoption of sustainable irrigation practices in Australian agriculture.

The Program aims to address critical emerging environmental management issues, while generating long-term economic and social benefits that ensure irrigation has a viable future. In the Knowledge Base ten years of irrigation research and development has been revisited and reviewed to identify lessons for irrigation sustainability.

• SWAGMAN Farm® Modeling System
  SWAGMAN Farm® modeling system is a computer modeling system developed by scientists at CSIRO Land and Water in Griffith to help determine cost-effective options to achieve farm scale water and salt balance within irrigation areas.

The model takes into account distribution of soils within the farm, potential landuses, crop evaporative requirements, current irrigation practices, leaching requirement, annual rainfall, rainfall runoff, leakage to deeper aquifers, depth to watertable, capillary upflow from shallow watertable, salt concentration of irrigation water, groundwater, and rainwater, and the economic returns from potential landuses.

The model can be used to:

• provide farmers with a method to simulate and assess various farm cropping scenarios in terms of economic return and environmental effects;
• determine environmentally optimal irrigation intensity; and
• encourage water use efficiency through water and salinity auditing in an integrated model.

• Aquator Automated Irrigation for Flood Irrigation
  Automated Water Management Australia (AWMA) has developed and produced the 2003 Savewater Award recipient Aquator automated irrigation system for flood irrigators.

This is the first time that a personal computer and radio telemetry has been combined to provide an irrigation management system that effectively replaces the imprecision of manual irrigation pactices. It can generate water savings of up to 40 percent.

The Aquator system is a comprehensive S.C.A.D.A. (supervisory control and data acquisition) program designed specifically for irrigators. Aquator allows both monitoring and controlling of all irrigation functions from a computer. Radio signals are sent from the computer out to an individual solar-powered control module in the paddock. These farm modules can be used for opening and closing bay outlets, operating channel stops, controlling & both electric and diesel pumps etc., opening the wheel door as well as monitoring water levels, flows through the wheel and soil moisture.

• Weather stations
  There's a wide range of suppliers and distributors in Australia. Automatic Weather station start from approximately $5,000. There's a range of factors to consider apart from cost when purchasing an AWS.
• Automatic Weather Stations for agricultural and other applications
  This Bureau of Meteorology leaflet aims to assist members of the agricultural community and other groups interested in environmental monitoring in the purchase and operation of an AWS.