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The Murray-Darling Basin is an important agricultural region in Australia, accounting for around 40 per cent of Australia’s gross value of agricultural production (ABS 2008). While most agricultural land is used for dryland enterprises, the Basin also supports a large irrigation sector. In 2006-07, irrigated agriculture generated around $4.9 billion (or 39 per cent) of the gross value of agricultural production in the Basin (ABS 2009a).
The long-term outlook for water in the Murray-Darling Basin is likely to be one of increasing scarcity (CSIRO 2007a). The current and likely future water situation in the Basin has focussed attention on a range of challenging and often interrelated water issues, including government administrative responsibility for water management, the environment, trade-offs between water uses and more efficient water use.
To better understand the economic characteristics of irrigation industries at a farm level, ABARE was commissioned by the Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts to commence a program of surveying irrigation farms throughout the Murray-Darling Basin.
The survey collects a range of financial and physical data from irrigation farms in selected regions and industries within the Murray-Darling Basin. As well as providing a point in time reference, the survey results provide a baseline for monitoring future trends in industry performance. The survey results also provide an integrated dataset which is that used to research various issues affecting irrigation industries, including water trading, pressures for structural adjustment, on-farm investment in irrigation infrastructure, land use returns, irrigation technology and farm productivity.
A summary of results from 2007-08, the second year of the survey, are presented in this report. The content includes detailed farm physical and financial estimates by region and industry and a comparison with results from the previous year.
ABARE strives to use the best methodology available in producing estimates from its surveys. This may mean that estimates are revised as new or better information becomes available. When producing estimates from the 2007-08 irrigation survey, estimates for 2006-07 were recalculated to reflect additional benchmark information obtained from the ABS, ensuring the same methodologies were used for both survey years. This resulted in some estimates changing, in some cases significantly, from the preliminary estimates previously published, but will ensure more reliable comparisons across the two survey periods.