Hunting the yellow said:
maybe the answer is to put down a few wells just in case as ground water won't run dry as quickly as a dam will on the surface and purify the water that comes out so its drinkable for the stock and people
because laying a pipe line and piping it miles from a huge dam/lake to where its needed won't happen anytime soon with our gov
All sorts of legislation involved state by state for artesian water and sinking of bores and its usage. These days the price to sink a bore has gone through the roof as well. Father in law just put one in, $17,000. State subsidies might work but there are also issues with allocation/quotas. Groundwater bores to water stock are openly permitted, but irrigation is another thing. The great artesian basin is massive, 22% of the country but at the same time, it's not an unlimited resource plus the quality and quantity of aquifers can vary widely, I used to drink it, but it's not actually deemed fit for human consumption and some of it is so rough its unfit for stock. Even if you could freely irrigate with it, some of it is so heavily mineralised it would actually kill crops only after a few seasons of rotation due to build up. Some of it can even have a PH of 5 and lower, basically acid rain. And if it turns out you have good groundwater there is always the few that abuse quotas, an example being farmers caught irrigating 24/7 to grow potatoes for potato chips!
Most of the blokes in trouble would already have access to plenty of bore water to keep stock watered, but it has got so bad that cattle are eating dirt in some places. Those that don't have usable bores on their property are caught in a catch 22 of spending $15k on several tons of feed hay, or sinking a bore that might fail to hit usable water. I'm not sure what the solution is but the future looks bleak for the sole primary producers that stick to it because they have for 4+ generations. It's very hard for a lot of them to walk away even when it is dire, just in case the next year or two or maybe even five are good ones. Hopefully, all the support the government has promised can be expedited in helping all those in desperate need. Australia has always been a dry old place but in the 200 years that we built the place on wool and wheat, we have done quite a bit of damage upsetting the balance. Plenty of properties in Australia where you can see 5, 10, 20 thousand hectares devoid of anything but intensive wheat cropping as far as the eye can see. We didn't really know back in the day, that unfettered clearing of land and intensive cultivation of increasingly marginal lands would be detrimental to the ecosystem. Especially the semi arid grasslands that circle the interior, the same as in the US mass clearing and intensive cropping of wheat led to the Dust Bowl in the 1930's, even though agricultural technology in the US at the time actually lagged behind advancements in Australia. We could have learned a lot from the blackfellas about a land we decided to grow crops in (and we did it quite well for a long time) that was really not suited for deep tillage-based agriculture (perhaps not so much including the temperate south-east) and to an extent the cloven hoof.
The Bradfield Scheme was proposed just before WWII diverted attention and workers elsewhere, basically divert a series of rivers inland. It turned out unfeasible at the time due to elevation issues and the high evaporation percentage as the water made its way to the interior. They might have had the chance to do it economically back then but that chance has passed, even with massive improvements in drilling, tunneling and excavation technology the Federal and State governments would have to commit phenomenal amounts of money to the project, tens of billions that would likely turn into hundreds of billions. Wages needed would cripple the project in this day and age. The Chunnel for example 37.9 km would cost over $22 billion AUD today, and wages are higher here so probably closer to 30 billion.
I'm super tired but I hope I made some sense.
