• Price Farms, Mungindi
• Glen and Sue Price with other business partners farm 4 properties near Mungindi on the Border Rivers (Barwon) between NSW and Qld. They also have two irrigation properties in the Saint George Irrigation Area.  They have also previously sharefarmed an additional three properties however due to the drought the owners are less likely to enter into a share farming arrangement due to the need to share costs.
• They also have approximately 500 hectares of dryland area and 4000 hectares of grazing.
• The drought has had significant impacts on their operations with no cotton or sunflowers grown in 2007.  This has resulted in a number of changes.
• Reduced income
• Significantly reduced land cropped under irrigation
• Some staff have moved to the mines in Qld so they are recruiting South African farmers as employees to address their skills needs
• As the operation is conducted over two states there are differences and similarities in water use. Water licences are held in both states and Continuous Accounting (see Purcell study) is used where water can be carried over for up to 3 years and 200% of allocation and this is balanced against monthly usage. In the Saint George irrigation area the Prices do not carry water forward as the dry hot climate causes significant losses from their stored balance held in the state operated dams, thus to use the water with the least losses it is usually used in the year that it is first available. New South Wales storages (Copeton Dam) is in a much cooler area and is deeper so that evaporative losses are much less so they farmers will manage their water differently.
• In drought years they will use the limited water for irrigated wheat as it has a lower water requirement than cotton and grows in winter when the evaporative demand is lower so that less water is lost in transmission and storage.
• The farmers have used the drought as an opportunity to rebuild some infrastructure such as storages and channels whilst the ground is dry and heavy earthmoving equipment can be used.
• In some irrigation areas such as Dirranbandi (Qld)and Copeton scheme some farmers have sold their water allocation and no longer have any entitlement. This means that their irrigation infrastructure is now unable to be used . This is called “stranded infrastructure”. Some owners have sold off their entitlement except for supplemental (flood) flows and will only fill storages when there is a flood and opportunistically irrigate in wet years only and use dryland production methods at other times.
• Like most good irrigators, extensive records are maintained of storage, pumping and usage, using high tech instrumentation and telemetry.
• Glenn and his business partners all hold degrees in Rural Science from the University of New England, and started as agronomists, then share farmed properties and now own property in their own right as well as providing consultancy and management services to other growers and landholders.
• Look at the photos
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• Note the supply channel is higher than the return channel which brings all the unused and storm water back to the storage for reuse.
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• This device records storage levels and takes input from the base of the storage to minimise wind effects. This is one of the devices developed by Aquatech to monitor efficiencies
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• Pumping station on Barwon River.

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