Proposal to trickle irrigate at Loburn

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34151, 12 May 1976, Page 27

Proposal to trickle irrigate at Loburn

A trickle irrigation scheme, primarily for Loburn fruit trees and berry bushes, will be put to a postal vote closing at 5 p.m. on Friday at the office of the Ashley County Council at Amberley.

The County Clerk (Mr A. J. McKendry) said last week that 41 would be eligible to vote in the poll. Mr S. W. Sargent, an associate in the firm of Royds, Sutherland and McLeay, consulting engineers to the Ashley County, said that there were about 20 orchards in the area of the proposed scheme.

He said that the Loburn district was a pioneer area in the country in the use of trickle irrigation. A number of established orchards had been using the system for some time, but there had been a watersupply problem and properties already trickle irrigating would be drawing on the proposed scheme to a fairly large extent.

Water, he said, would ' be obtained from the gravels of the Okuku River through an infiltration gallery at the end of Chapel Road — a water right has already been obtained — and would be pumped from there to a reservoir near the junction of

Chapel and the main Loburn roads. From the reservoir water will be gravity fed to the orchards and delivered to header tanks or received through pressure reducing valves. Both systems will provide a constant head for the trickle irrigation system in the orchard.

It is proposed to deliver water to the orchards for 24 hours a day. Where orchardists wish to apply water at a faster rate than provided for under the scheme they will have to rotate application around their properties or provide storage for this purpose. To keep construction costs down some work would be done by voluntary labour. Mr Sargent said that as the system would be a piped rather than a channel irrigation scheme and as the pipes would be very long lasting, maintenance costs would be very low.

Most of the. annual charge! would be to pay back pro-; petty’ occupiers’ share of the; initial construction costs and i wou'd provide a hedge! against inflation. For the-first two seasons of use there would be no payments made but thereafter charges would be increased progressively. By the seventh season those using the system would be paying the equivalent of about $4O per hectare and

about §3O where no water! was used.

An application for a subsidised irrigation scheme for the area was made at the end of 1974 and last year! the Water Resources Council! approved the scheme in principle allocating $3OOO for further investigations,) design and survey. To carry the proposal at) least 60 per cent of those voting will have to be in favour and in that event it will again be referred to the Water Resources Council; which might then make the money available. But in a bulletin just issued to potential voters the District Commissioner of Works (Mr P. F. Reynolds) says: “We do not know if! the Government’s attitude to) capita! works expenditure! will affect or delay construction, but it does not give) cause for optimism.” Under current Government policy the Government would meet the cost of the headworks of such a scheme and would provide a subsidyamounting to half of the cost of off-farm reticulation and a third of the cost of on-farm works. The Water Resources Council has ruled that the Government subsidy’ on onfar ii works will apply only to underground pipe retij eolation and sprinkler equipment fixed to it.