'The word up here,'' says a local milk industry manager, ''is uncertainty.''

And it doesn't take much to ratchet up the levels. Last month new figures purporting to show major slumps in house prices in 14 key basin towns were seized on by critics as evidence that the draft plan was ''destroying confidence in irrigation communities''.

Strathmerton was worst hit, said property information firm RP Data. After a 13 per cent increase in 2010, prices plunged by a staggering 43 per cent.

Opposition water spokesman Barnaby Joyce sheeted the blame home to a confidence drop caused by the original guide to the draft plan released in October 2010. '

'Water is wealth and 2.1 million people in the basin are underpinned by the wealth of the Murray-Darling system,'' he said.

''These people [whose house values are falling] are not irrigators, they're people owning tyre shops or working behind counters in grocery stores.''

But the real meaning behind the numbers was quickly challenged. Local real estate figures argued that the wide discrepancy in percentages was likely because some small towns have only a few sales each year. The Shepparton News pointed out that Jerilderie showed an increase in values of 54 per cent.

Says a dairy industry researcher, who asks to remain anonymous: ''It's a really variable trend … It's really dubious data.''

Malcolm Johns is a bit more direct. ''They're bullshit figures,'' he says, pointing out the new houses and half and quarter-acre lots being developed at the western end of town.

''It's starting to develop actually. I'm not going to say that's because Strathy is a thriving area - it's economics. You go to Cobram and buy a block, you'll look at $80,000 or $90,000 for that bit of ground, but here you can buy a block for half, two-thirds of the price, with basically the same servicing.''

The person behind the grocery counter in Strathmerton is Cindy Newall, who has run the general store and newsagency with partner Adam Forster for 3½ years.

She's noticed a few more families moving into town in the last couple of years. ''I think a lot of them come to work at the [Bega Cheese] factory, but it's also the river, the lifestyle, the tree-change. ''

Bega Cheese bought the struggling former Kraft factory on the eastern edge of town in 2009. A cheese cutting and packing facility, it has since added about 150 employees, says chairman Barry Irvin. The company also bought into Tatura Milk Industries, about 45 minutes down the Goulburn Valley Highway in 2007 and took full ownership in 2010. It has 350 full-time staff there.

''We're the rare manufacturer that's actually a good-news story in northern Victoria,'' says Irvin. ''So we take, I guess, a pragmatic view of the Murray-Darling Basin plan. Ironically enough, we were buying into northern Victoria as everyone else was running away.''

And that side of the story can be seen in the strip of small businesses running down the main street of ''Strathy''.

George's Takeaway is long closed, Statewide Plumbing is boarded up, and butcher Dennis Robins says it's a battle, but Strathy Cafe, the Caltex servo, the bakery and coffee lounge and the Railway Hotel have been doing good business - particularly because the last holiday season was the best the area has had in a couple of years.

Yet there are 29 For Sale ads in one window of the general store (including one for the store itself) for homes and properties here and in nearby towns.

In Strathmerton there are $45,000 quarter-acre blocks and $75,000 half-acres in a development on Patrick Street, a four-bedroom home for $195,000 and a holiday house close to the river (Make an Offer!) for $109,000. A lovely homestead with a pool on 320 acres is going for $790,000.

And there are six nearby dairy properties ranging from 180 to 470 acres and from $580,000 to $1.775 million.

These are what Barry Irvin calls ''the horrible statistics'' on Australian dairying, battered by a range of factors but most damagingly by 10 years of a once-in-a-century drought, exacerbated by the impact of the global financial crisis and, within three months of that, a sudden crash in dairy prices internationally.

''It was nirvana while there was water,'' he says. Coming into the new century, the Australian dairy industry was producing close to 12 billion litres of milk. Now it has shrunk to 9 billion. Northern Victoria, the largest dairy region in the nation, produced 3 billion but is now down to about 1.8 billion. It supplied 27 per cent of Australia's milk but now provides just 17 per cent.

Back in Strathy, Malcolm Johns looks up at the fat black, wet clouds and sees, well, if not a silver lining, a very different scenario. He's just bought the farm next door, without water, and plans to modernise and expand his herd - though not by much.

He doesn't think much of the basin plan - and doesn't get why people in Melbourne can't learn to conserve their water, instead of leaving the burden to ''the buggers on the other side of the ranges'' - but he'll learn to live with it.

''I've always found I work around whatever happens, '' he says. ''The drought came and you worked around the bloody thing. They say the plan's going to devastate the industry, but until such time as we know what we've got, you just can't say.''

He points at the rain outside. ''It may well be that if we get the next 10 or 20 years like this, which some of these long-range forecasters are saying, it won't matter a shit because we can't use the water we've got.'' He has a 170-megalitre water right, but more than 60 megalitres of carry-over from previous years. ''We'll be flat out using that water this year.''

The biggest problem this year, he reckons, will be floods in winter. ''If we get heavy rains in the catchment in the next two or three months, they've got no idea what they're gonna do with all that bloody water. Why they need to buy more of the stuff now just defies me.''