Australian irrigators are under increasing pressure to

maintain the viability of their farm businesses in the

face of reduced surface and ground-water allocations;

increasing competition from alternative users (such as

urban, industry and the environment); the cost-price

squeeze; and the uncertainties in climate change.

The key challenge to irrigation growers is then how

to identify practical and actionable strategies that

increase returns per ML of water available at the

whole farm level while at the same time reducing or

minimizing risks.

Here we report the experiences of a team of farming

systems that used experimental and participatory

modelling methods to explore farmer’s opportunities to

develop more profitable and less risky irrigated cotton-grains, rice-grains farm businesses.

For all our case study farms we could jointly identify and

quantify strategies that would allow them to improve

returns without increasing risk. In some cases our results

confirmed farmer’s intuitive expectations. Farmer’s

response to this new information varied, though a key

learning was a better understanding the trade-offs

between potential gains in profits at the cost of taking a

little extra risk.

Clearly for farmers on river entitlements, the value of

seasonal stream flow forecasts

(www.bom.gov.au/water/ssf) was a positive surprise.