My name's Ian Pearce.
My name's Pru Pearce.
We operate an orchard called Stoneleigh which is about eight kilometres
north of Orange in New South Wales.
Here we grow apples.
About five different varieties of apples.
About four or five different varieties of cherries as well.
So it's fresh fruit production.
We've been here just over 20 years
and this industry is forever evolving with different varieties
and trying to keep up with new ways of doing things and to try
and make it more efficient as possible because we are very labour intensive.
The climate, it is noticeably getting warmer.
That is definitely a factor in what we're doing
and I think our rainfall is getting less predictable.
So that brings with it issues that you have to try and manage.
We're reliant here on rain fed dams.
We've got one irrigation bore which is out of a basalt aquifer
so they're not the most reliable.
And we have a creek system about a kilometre away
that we have a licence to pump from, but all those are highly variable.
We don't have a big dam that supplies us water.
So that dry summer 2019/20,
risk was getting greater and greater because rainfall wasn't there.
And there was no additional ability to source any irrigation water for us.
There seems to be a trend where we're not getting really good,
reliable spring rainfall and then following on through the season,
we tend to be getting more intense and less predictable rainfall.
In the summer of 2019,
that was the latter period of a really, really bad dry period.
Quite extended and quite severe.
The creek was just about dry and I was at the point of actually looking
and thinking that we just have to save the trees. It was pretty bad.
After the 2019/20 drought was the subsequent season in the spring,
we had no bees. We rely here on native bees.
We don't introduce bees in hives. But that year I couldn't believe it.
That bee population was significantly reduced due to that
lack of food source during that drought period I think.
You never know when it's going to rain.
You never know, whether it's going to be really windy day
and that's when you sort of pollination of your bees,
and if it's really windy, is your fruit going to pollinate?
Can you get critical sprays on at the right time?
You know, if you have a great season,
you get a great crop, you get fantastic prices.
If everything's going well and your bank balance is looking
well and the bank is happy, you know, everything's rosy.
But when you get a couple of hailstorm storms
and then you get rain at the wrong time,
this time last year we'd finished picking three weeks ago,
but the season has been so long and so late because it's actually been
not much sun at times, it's been colder and things haven't ripened as much.
A noticeable increase in fruit bats in the area.
And they did significant damage to crops.
We had to put in some extra netting so they couldn't get in.
So we have the nets over the top for the hail,
but we also had to put the in side nets and it stopped them becoming consumers of apples.
I've grown up with risk, but you want to manage it as best you can
so how did it feel that year to realise we're going to run out of water?
It was bad,
but I also felt there was an opportunity there to to do something about it.
So that's what we did.
So as a part of a DPI project, we've
installed a number of sensors within the orchard canopy.
Through my phone I can access the home page and off
that we can get information on tank water levels
and all the information from the weather station
and the information from different sensors in the orchard.
I can walk up here now
and I can see the tree. I can see what's happening
and I can see what the data’s saying at the same time.
We’re modifying how we irrigate. We're irrigating less now
with under tree sprinklers and more with drip irrigation.
By moving from a system of one fine micro sprinkler per tree
to two lines of drip per tree we've actually halved our water use.
So we're watering more regularly but a lot less amount.
Also have a situation where in hot, dry periods,
our soil temperatures fluctuate a lot more.
We look to move towards using mulches and things like that under the tree
to try and reduce that temperature fluctuation and also conserve moisture.
We've also put in in recent years hail netting
and we did that with a view of protecting our crops against hail
but there's been a bunch of other benefits of doing that,
including less evaporation.
It's more humid under the netting system so our water use efficiency is better.
Less sunburn and protection from invasive species like bats
and birds that you don’t particularly want getting and eating your fruit.
We've got a lot going our way and we've just got to work out
how we can have a sustainable
and viable business going into the future in agriculture
because it is certainly very challenging at the moment doing what we're doing
and we do have our minds open to change.