Hello and good afternoon this is Rob Hoogers from NSW DPI, just a quick
information session about anyone preparing an IFWUEA for the round six sustaining the
basin funding. Ok on with it. There are quite a few handouts on our webpage for
the IFWUEAs. There's a hand out information pack for everything
to do with round six. There is an example IFWUEA and there's an IFWUEA form which is the
template to your first point of contact application for
the whole process. IFWUEAs have been now for a few rounds all about the losses
not the changes to your farm. This change came about after a review of round one and
two, so from round four onward we just look at and focus on the water loss associated with
your current irrigation system and the funding application that will come after
the IFWUEA will then address that water loss, and they have to line up.
So all IFWUEAs have to be verified prior to submitting an infrastructure application
for funding, in fact you won't get an infrastructure application until after we
verified your IFWUEAs. It is the first step in the process. If you have an IFWUEA
from round four or five that has been verified, it does not need resubmitting.
If you have an IFWUEA from round three that's verified, that's inacceptable, we need you to
you do pages 1 to 5 to renew your details of the farm. So you will need to resubmit the
IFWUEA but only do pages 1 to 5. If you have done a round one or two IFWUEA, we will need you to
resubmit that completely, and fill in the assessment criteria round
four to round six according to IFWUEA example if you can please. What defines the IFWUEA area?
It is the irrigation management unit
the IFWUEAs located and the water loss associated with that irrigation area. A bit more defined an
irrigation management area is a farming unit which may be irrigated from one or
multiple water sources including the full hydraulic extent of that, doesn't mean it has to be
completely connected so there's a bit of flexibility there but knowing that you do have to, this IFWUEA will be what your application is.
So you can subdivide it but then you need to do three applications, it's a lot
easier to keep it all together as one
irrigation management unit then subdividing it. Losses need to be calculated
using one of the three but not all three methods, so you have direct measurements of
inefficiencies within your system whether that be
channel losses, storage losses or field losses; they are obviously the best
measurements but we don't always have those. Whole farm water balance is good for
identifying loss across the whole farm, probably the easiest way is to do a water use efficiency
comparison with industry so if you do water use efficiency of
your crops that are growing and there's a shortfall that identifies the holistic losses you
can then nut down to direct measurements or part of your whole farm balance to find
out where those losses are occurring. You need to subdivide your losses according
to the areas that they are so that the works can be attributed to those, so if you
have a hundred percent field losses and you want to fix your storage, your funding
application will not be considered fruitfully because the losses need to be associated with where
the works are going to happen. So subdivide them to storage, distribution, field and
production losses so that that will line up with your funding application in the next
step. Then to be realistic they will be assessed on being realistic
so the best way to be realistic is to look at the benchmark to the industry
for those particular crops that you're growing. Map has to describe the area of loss and that's an
important factor as well.
Only the applicant will be accepted which address the losses identified in the IFWUEA area and
that mapped area will be the basis for your funding application. Once the IFWUEA form is
completed the applicant sends all sections to DPI. Don't forget all of
your consultant declaration and your declarations on the one form. So just in summary
the process for funding firstly is to express your interest,
self-assessment on eligibility,
eligible irrigators submit an IFWUEA form by registered post date stamped the first of
October, that's your first step. Verified within 10 business days by myself in DPI, if
clarification is required it's not a knockback process, it's a matter of having
another 10 business days to negotiate the errors, fix them up and get all the
technical issues out of the way before the money round, before the funding application
is put in. This whole process of the IFWUEA is for ironing out all those technical
issues, so that those technical issues don't knock you out of funding in the next
round. Step five - after the verification of your IFWUEA there will be reimbursement of up
to 80% of the cost of submitting, getting a consultant to look at your water losses,
up to $2,000, and then eligible irrigators with verified IFWUEAs
will be sent their infrastructure application form.
So the documents you need will all be on the website which is the address on the
bottom of that slide, the IFWUEA form needs to be back by the first of October.
There's information and an
example IFWUEA. Just stressing that you don't need to do your IFWUEA to the
full extent of the example IFWUEA. The example IFWUEA looks at all the different ways of
producing an IFWUEA, your water loss assessment may be much more simple than that.
Any questions Ed that
I didn't cover away very well. No, that looks pretty good actually it's fairly
clear.