Four speakers, including Christine Campbell of Twynam, Dr Glen Walker from the CSIRO, Kelvin Baxter from Murray Irrigation Ltd and Ian MacKinnon, a grain and livestock producer from Tasmania, discussed this controversial issue.

Mr MacKinnon (pictured) runs his farming operation on 8571 hectares in the midlands of Tasmania, of which 690ha is under centre pivot irrigation.

He started irrigating following a steady decrease in rainfall and intends to further expand the area under irrigation.

“At times we were only getting 300-500 millimetres,” Mr MacKinnon said.

“There was no certainty about what you could do, so therefore came the first dam.”

Fortunate to have river frontage, Mr MacKinnon was in a position where he could “see the megalitres running past” and knew he had an opportunity to irrigate.

Security of water was an issue for Mr MacKinnon and so he bought the water outright.

“I needed to be able to look at the water and say, ‘Well, I own that, we’ve got our hands on that.’”

This irrigation capability has given Mr MacKinnon the ability to grow high value crops such as poppies, as well as develop pastures for prime lamb production.

“We harvest the poppy crops in January, and then put the pasture in, so we are double cropping in a sense,” he said.

Mr MacKinnon also has plans to diversify his enterprise mix by extending into a 2500 head dairy operation within the next five to ten years.

“We’re moving into dairy because I think that we’re going to look back in 40 years time and say ‘what a good industry that would have been to get into.’ It looks like this industry is going to be one of those shining lights.”

And by spreading his risk in what could potentially become a drier climate with more frost incidents, Mr MacKinnon said it could make good business sense to move out of cropping and spreading his risk through a new venture.