The balance between irrigation profitability and natural resource management has often been stated as a policy goal but not defined in any quantitative way. The quatitative information is crucial when examining options, both policy and on farm, that aim to increase water use efficiency and achieve natural resource and economic sustainability at a farm level. SWAGMAN Farm® modeling system developed by scientists at CSIRO Land and Water in Griffith allows the determination of this balance in a real world context.

SWAGMAN Farm® modeling system is a management-oriented, multi-disciplinary computer modeling system developed to help determine cost-effective options to achieve farm scale water and salt balance within irrigation areas. The model takes into account distribution of soils within the farm, potential landuses, crop evaporative requirements, current irrigation practices, leaching requirement, annual rainfall, rainfall runoff, leakage to deeper aquifers, depth to watertable, capillary upflow from shallow watertable, salt concentration of irrigation water, groundwater, and rainwater, and the economic returns from potential landuses.

The model can be used to: provide farmers with a method to simulate and assess various farm cropping scenarios in terms of economic return and environmental effects; determine environmentally optimal irrigation intensity and encourage water use efficiency through water and salinity auditing in an integrated model; assist irrigation authorities (public & private) develop policy to achieve improved economic and natural resource sustainability.

Please click on SWAGMAN Farm to log on the SWAGMAN Farm® modeling system, or click on Log off to log of the system.