Designing for Resilience: Why Your Next Water Project is Actually a Grazing Strategy
I have a couple of clients at the moment where water is front of mind. New farms, unexisting or degraded stock water schemes, increasingly variable rainfall patterns and a tense moment last summer where water temporarily ‘ran out’. While these are perhaps ‘negative drivers’ to invest in water storage and reticulation, there are also many ‘positive drivers’.
When your stock are drinking out of muddy dams, competing at troughs due to low flow, or having to walk long distances on hills to water, you are limiting pasture performance (and therefore stocking rate) because your grazing management is restricted. You are also compromising animal performance due to stress, excess energy expenditure and poor water quality. This is all opportunity.
Work led by AgFirst in 2016 found that installing reticulated stock water on hill country farms had an average internal rate of return of 53% (the range was 14-85% IRR) and a 3-year payback period. With the price of pipe and fittings having increased significantly this year, those numbers might not look quite as sharp but likely still represent a great investment for many.
What I love about designing stock water systems is that you are effectively designing your current and future grazing systems at the same time, so you need to ask the right questions. In an ideal world, how would you graze each paddock? What size mobs might you want to run in future? What would be their peak water demand on a hot summer day and what flow rate would be needed to keep up with that demand? How reliable is my water source and do I need to look at increasing my water storage? How might we use dams and trough locations to enhance ecological and resilience outcomes in my farm landscape? Do I want options to use water for other purposes in future?
I’ve been a student of Australian farm planner Darren J. Doherty from Regrarians for over a decade now. We’re now collaborating on projects with our Groundshift clients, tapping into Darren’s world-leading knowledge and skills, as well as their new R-Earth software which allows us to design dams, tracks and agroforestry layouts in fraction of the time that it used to. If you’re thinking about a farm system change and/or infrastructure upgrade, we’d love to explore whether we can help.
We are also approved consultants for the ASB Every Hectare Matters programme. For some farmers, this could provide a mechanism to finance your development with ASB covering up to $25,000 in farm planning and consultancy costs.
