New South Wales bureaucrats have sought urgent suggestions from main cotton farmers on how fresh rainfall might harm their water harvesting infrastructure, in an apparent justified effort to retain the first rainfall in over a year, rather than letting it flow downstream.
The government announced on February 7, 2020 that it would limit the harvesting of overland flows throughout the northern Murray-Darling Basin for the first time, because it was ‘in the public interest.’ But within days, the government had lifted the ban for two valleys and part of a third. Emails obtained by the Guardian show the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment asked irrigator groups for ‘urgent’ advice on and examples of the sort of damage that their members might incur to levees, pumps and regulators if the water was allowed to flow across their land and then down the Barwon River to the Lower Darling.
But by the time the emails were sent, the NSW government had already given the large cotton growing areas a three-day exemption from the embargo. The cotton properties have extensive water harvesting infrastructure such as levees and pumps, which are used to divert overland flows into massive on-farm storages.
