Risk Management in irrigation is the process of identifying the potential risks, determining the chances of those risks occurring, estimating their impact and developing strategies and tactics to avoid or minimise their impact.
As well as calculating crop areas for available irrigation in a median or average year (refer article What is Water Budgeting?) you also need to work out the impact of a dry and wet year to see how much difference it would make. You will need to assess whether risks could be compounded by other demands on available water such as “cease to pump” orders on unregulated rivers or reduced allocations of water during prolonged droughts.
Possible risk management strategies could include increasing on-farm storages before the growing season, planting less or trading for more water allocation. Managing risks involves decision making by the farm manager based on costs and benefits.
Benchmarking is the process of measuring the performance of your business against past performance and the performance of others.This technique is especially useful in considering your water use efficiency.
Record keeping is the key to the benchmarking process and to improving the performance of your farming business. To benchmark your irrigation operation, you need to gather information on all the inputs and outputs involved such as:
• Area irrigated
• Rainfall
• Irrigation water use
• Production from irrigated area (in tonnes, trays, bushels etc)
• Inputs required (fertiliser, chemicals, labour etc)
• Number of production Units (trees, cows, bays, rows etc)
• Once you have gathered this information, you can establish some Key Performance Indicators (KPI) on the important areas of your irrigation performance.
KPI’s for irrigators should include:
- Yield (tonnes per ha)
- Water use Efficiency (L per hectare),
- Economic Value (ML per tonne) or (ML per ha).
You are then able to compare your irrigation performance with others, usually in the same area and growing the same crops, to be able to judge how well you are going and whether there is room to improve your performance.
