Brothers Tom and Alex Woods are grinning from ear to ear.
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The Pitnacree vegetable growers finally have access to fresh water to nourish their crops after rain throughout the Hunter River catchment last week pushed the salinity downstream.
It’s the first win they’ve had since the lack of rain made salinity levels rise so much that they were more than triple what they should be.
It was an anxious time for them – high salinity kills vegetable crops and it also prevents lucerne hay from growing and turns it yellow.
When their cabbage seedlings started arriving last month they were forced to irrigate – even though the water was salty – so they could put moisture in the dry soil.
Now the plants have had 60 millimetres of fresh water on them they are bouncing out of the ground.
The timing was really good. Now that we’ve had the fresh coming down it’s going to push the salt back to Raymond Terrace and we should have a good reprieve for three to four week,
- Farmer Tom Woods
“The forecast shows we’ll get some more drips and drabs of rain as the week goes on and that is going to help maintain the river quality for a while.
“The moisture we’ve got won’t stay here but when we need to irrigate again we can use fresh water, quality water – thank god for that.”
Tom said many other farmers along the river had been forced to stop irrigating because of the salinity levels.
He said that had a dire effect on all of them – especially the vegetable and hay growers.
He has called on the state government to consult with farmers and put a water strategy in place to ensure that landholders with water licences always have access to quality water.
The problem has gone away for now but we don’t need to be put in that position again where we have no alternative,
- Tom Woods
“We were put in a very precarious position and we shouldn’t have been.
“I don’t want to be put in that position again with a lot more crop in the ground at a different time of year. Preventative measures are always better than having to fix something after it has broken.”