Aquatek's blog

Australian cricket legend Steve Waugh opens the St Clair Oval irrigated by an Aquatek Irrigation system in an inaugural 20/20 match with the Woodville Cricket Club at their new home ground.

To all our customers and suppliers we wish you all the best for the new year ahead. We are looking forward to some new products and services to be released in the year ahead to help you plan, implement and manage your irrigation systems. Water conservation and efficient water use will continue to be prime market drivers this year.

Best Regards

Darren Ferber

Managing Director

Aquatek Irrigation Pty Ltd.

An article from Forbes on the USA water infrastructure and how it can create jobs....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2011/10/05/jobs-and-water-for-america/

In Australia we have the same types of issues but are now experiencing some "cycling" in policy/actions from our governments and water providers. This is due to the fact that we had a significant about 10 year crippling drought followed by the last 2 years of better conditions and some record single rainfall events to fill our catchments. Droughts to flooding rains as our older farmers remember.

Water pricing across Australia has increased significantly over the last few years due to scarcity and infrastructure investments such as desalination.

A hectare of turf could now cost anywhere from $ 12,000 to $ 20,000 per year to be kept in a playable condition. The difference in the watering cost, some $ 8000 per year could be due to poorly performing irrigation systems or bad water management.

You would need to double the above figures for a typical oval

Is risk management out of control. As a small business we often are prevented from growing due to risk management, as governement agencies will lean to large multi national corporations that can take on the risk. Does this mean smaller companies can never grow and in the end competition is in fact minimized to a small handful, with very big hands..?

Innovation is also severely thwarted due to the fact that everybody is looking to shift the risk to someone else so in the end no one is game to do anything outside the "Norm".

Have we learned from the recent cycles of agricultural boom to busts and consolidations as has been evidenced recently in the wine industry.

The agricultural market cycle of:

We dig mines for valuable commodities, sometimes going so deep for these resources that we strike water (not oil..lol) and then use this arguably (to some) even more valuable commodity for revegetation whilst our smallest farmers who feed us go broke??? Go figure...

The catch phrase send it to the cloud....give me a break. Will it make you a better orgainization, maybe but probably not. Just look at the clouds do you see any the same...lol

Just went for a little drive for lunch on our sunny 22deg C Adelaide day and came across something interesting. A council (unnamed) were just installing some irrigation. As a water professional I took interest in what they were doing.

In fact only one of the six workers seemed to be doing anything at this time and he was sketching on a clipboard and paper the new irrigation system he just designed and installed. This new system had 20 year old technology sprinklers and water was running down the road (current best practice is lower volume larger droplet types).