Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Did anyone catch the 7.30 report last night? There are plans at the moment to turn Tasmania into the new food bowl of Australia... They are talking about collecting all the rain that falls on the west coast of Tassie, then piping it over to the east coast to irrigate massive agribusinesses.

We have destroyed the Murray Darling system by sucking all the water out of the environment and what have we learned from the experience? Nothing, just the fact that you move on to the next place and try to do the same all over again. Of course the Tasmanian premier thought it was a great idea...

I really hope there are enough people in Tasmania who are of the right frame of mind to stop this happening.. Though I guess it will be a slow thing, start a bit at a time, then before you know it the whole interior and east coast will be irrigated agribusiness, sucking all the water from the west...

I find that a very odd proposition ...Considering Tasmanias environmental stance politically and socially. Greens Senator Bob Brown is a Taswegian himself, no? ...Considering Tasmanias previous environmental indiscretions (logging, paper milling, dam building, heavy metal refining, to name a few) ...Considering Tasmanias conservative viewpoints.

Tassies West Coast is a beautiful and rugged place and must be one of Australias last frontiers.

What would be more sensible is something like this (again I don't have all the answers)

Install a number of Thorium based pebble bed reactors (much safer than full nuclear).
They Provide cheaper power and also almost zero polution (thorium is magnitudes safer than carbon based power solutions such as Oil, Gas and Coal).
We can use the excess power to run de-salination plants to provide water to the interior, also improving erosion and claim back some desert areas.

Interestingly the reason why the world (well the americans anyway) went with uranium based reactors is that they produce loads more plutonium (for bombs) whereas Thorium produces a ver tiny amount and is therefore safer to export to those marginal countries.

We could say put in lots of solar, wind, they're great but the cost benefits ratio I understand is a long way off. (I'm sure if I'm wrong someone will let me know

my 2c.....

[quote="phred"]What would be more sensible is something like this (again I don't have all the answers)

Install a number of Thorium based pebble bed reactors (much safer than full nuclear).
They Provide cheaper power and also almost zero polution (thorium is magnitudes safer than carbon based power solutions such as Oil, Gas and Coal).
We can use the excess power to run de-salination plants to provide water to the interior, also improving erosion and claim back some desert areas.


Yep Phred

That is why there is a big rush on moon colony by many countries. There is a lot of Thorium on that cheese mound

I dunno that they actually have thorium based pebble bed reactors yet do they?

Still gotta deal with that high saline water left over from desalination though and so far they aren't very good at that either.

We need to look at the problem from a different angle encourage growing within city boundaries, the old agribusiness models fail in the long term and trying to prop them up just seems like such a waste.

This moving water from Tassies west to east coast has been mentioned before. The way I see it is that the plan is to move water from the existing large hydro dams in the west like Lakes Pedder, Gordon and Burbury up to the lakes in the central highlands like Great Lake and Arthurs Lake and then drop it down to the flat farming land in the east creating hydo electricity in the process. I can see some merit in doing this as currently the water from all the west coast hydro dams just runs to sea after generating electricity so why not use some for food production??

But didn't they used to think the same with the Murray Darling, it's just all running out to sea, so why not use it... Unfortunately many of our actions have unforeseen side effects.

Like the proposed Olympic Dam desalination plant. What damage can happen from pumping out a bit of high saline water into the already salty ocean? Ooops, just hapens to be one of the only breeding grounds of giant cuttlefish anywhere in the world, and they have discovered that the increased salinity will stop them breeding.

Inversely if we stop the flows of native rivers that have flowed for millions of years in to bays and areas of ocean, what will this do to the immediate environment?

I spoke to a "natural scientist" who works over in Holland about some of the ecological disasters human kind is inflicting on the world, he had a really interesting viewpoint:

Essentially destruction is a catalyst for change. That even though we, as a human race, are destroying the earth and generally being absolute pricks, we will die out as a race just as quickly as we have emerged, and we will have changed the world, and it will continue. He cited all these references to elephants in the congo which go around knocking down the jungle which is essential for the circle of life to continue, kind of like our australian bushfires, and that archeologiests (possibly of another intelligent race) will find a layer of elements (as in periodic table of elements) in their geological study which will correspond to our impact on the planet (because we dig everything up and burn it). And that evolution had a direct correlation to the amount of elements available to the lifeforms alive, essentially because we dig everything up and burn it, there's heaps of all sorts of elements available, and we might actually be causing a boom in evolution (I assume after we're gone).

Anyway, his point was that he had to take a different viewpoint, because he was right on the forefront of environmental research, and could see what we were doing but felt entirely helpless to change our ways, so he just came up with a different viewpoint.

Back on topic:
I think people don't use "natural" solutions enough, e.g. growing veggies in people's backyards like they do in cuba etc, but it helps ease my mind if I think from a perspective that we will have changed the planet and that "nature" will bounce back in whatever form it can.

And to finish, a happy news story - the hole in the ozone? The one we created? And then the world banned those chemicals - it's now closing up. So we made a boo boo, we recognised it, we fixed it. As a race. So we can take responsibility for our actions.

Nope, not a single commercial plant...not even after 50 years of research... the Germans almost had one, and closed it down... the South African program has been terminated.... China is rumoured to have a "prototype"

True, but there has been a continual decline in rainfall in the Murray Darling catchment and no corresponding drop in the amount of water taken out for farming until just recently. Because of the perfect conditions on Tassies west coast they can actually make it rain there by aerial seeding of the clouds. Cant remember exactly how it was done but saw a program on it once where the locals were complaining as it rained all the time!!

Spot on Troutman...I grew up fishing on the Murray, and IMO it was the slow reaction to the drought that caused the major issues. It's amazing to see the infrastructure that has resulted, with water now pumped all over Victoria in pipes (replacing open channels), and no more farm dams.

I lived and work on the West coast of Tassie for approx 12mths, and I can tell you it is one cold and miserable place.
It rained almost every day of winter, and most other days also, so no real need for the cloud seeding.
My front lawn was actaully moss, and the local footy field is gravel, as it's too wet for turf (not surprisingly they generally don't lose a home match). 50m arc is scratched into the ground.
There is a huge amount of water there, massive flows out to sea constantly, and plenty is already being used to generate hydro power, and maybe that is what they are going to try and re-use...

A comparison with the Lake Argyle water usage plans would probably be a closer comparison.

The main concern I would have with the Tassie plan would be the possibility of the potentailly cancer causing foam that comes from the plantation run-off (ABC report last year)...
A local GP is running a test program on the local area as she has been finding extremely rare cancers in her small town, that with a population of that size would normally not likely see 1 case let alone several cases. Her water tests seem to suggest the foam that is generated from the turbulent water entering the streams appears to carry high levels of harmful toxins.

But isn't this the precise thing we have to look at, just because there's a lot of rain there, doesn't mean you can grab it all and ship it elsewhere, there are ecosystems which over millions of years have evolved and adapted, and rely on these large amounts of water. And this isn;t just on land, in the bays and around the coast line there will be ecosystems that rely on those large amounts of fresh water flowing.

So thinking that you can just transfer the agro-industry food bowl from the Murray Darling into Tassie is just moving one problem from one area, into another area where the problems may end up being the same if not worse. You can;t tell what will happen and you run a good risk of buggering up further pristine areas. You have to look at the cause of the problem, our current agro-industry practices are not viable, especially not in the driest continent on the earth.

I watched that one about the run off from the Eucalyptus nitens plantations, who would have thought. In our wisdom we assume that planting lots of gum trees in a big monoculture plantation will solve problems for forestry supplies, who would have thought that it could be a huge problem, causing extremely high levels of rare cancers in the areas. Just try a search online for Eucalyptus nitens cancer.

20 years ago there was a proposal made by the Victorian government to pipeline water from Tas to Melb to feed the Urban Boom. This was too costly at the time. So instead, bit by bit, the Murray Darling basin has been sucked dry, not just from urban populace expansion, but from large scale agribusiness.

4 years ago during the height of the drought, 3 of the state governments stated there is more revenue in urban people paying expanded prices for water than what the water delivers within food and state revenue from farmers. When people talk about the Murray Darling Basin crisis, it has been used as a tool for economic and political point scoring. Much better to become gross importers of food and have trade off deals exporting our minerals and precious resources in return - people dont realise though that we are importing produce that has been covered in toxic chemicals like DDT and carcinogens that are banned here. Lets face it, there are more votes in the cities than the country and most people vote with there wallets more than their conscience.

When my grandfather was a boy, the only way they got into town (Mildura) from the NSW side was by horse and cart across the river bed. Occasionally, when the river was flowing, they had a small ferry. The river did not flow out to the ocean except for once every 7 or so years. In fact through history there had even been shark sightings as far up the river as Murray Bridge from the back flows from the ocean. The estuaries that the environmentalists want saved as wetlands in SA were in fact only full every 14 years or so anyway.

The government has bouyed up MIS schemes in the last 20 years (including cotton and rice which use up horrific amounts of water) to the point of overallocating 1000s of Megalitres of water for these investment properties, which with the new Murray Darling Basin Plan wanting to take over 30% of our water, curiously does not include the large MIS water storages as its "too hard to calculate" so they are exempt.

Sorry about the longwinded outburst guys but its a passionate subject (could have put this into venting corner but this seemed more appropriate )

As one of the driest continents on the earth we must learn to live within our water means....

Not that most of you guys over east would be concerned about lack of water at the moment......

I keep trying to tell the fish that.