While the drought brings anguish to most Australians, surprisingly, there are some exceptions. For water drilling contractors it is boom time - they are being run off their feet as desperate landholders look beneath the dry earth for a solution to the water crisis.
Around the Ballarat and Bendigo districts of Victoria only a few areas provide quality bore water, as low levels of total dissolved salts (TDS) are required for successful irrigation use. But desperate times require desperate measures, and many have taken the borehole gamble, usually to be faced with a dilemma: they find water - but with high salt levels rendering it useless for irrigation.
What do you do? Cap the bore and cut your losses? Or spend more money to equip it and give the salty water a try, knowing you are probably committing botanical genocide? It's a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Units installed at Ballarat Golf Club
This was the problem facing Jack Moore from Strathfieldsaye near Bendigo last September when his bore came up at 5000 ppm. "I knew about reverse osmosis but also knew it was complex and way out of our price range. I'd vaguely heard of other treatments but then stumbled on a report on the Federal Department of Agriculture's site about a water treatment trial in South Australia. It was about solving calcification problems caused by hard water but it mentioned salinity and led me to the equipment's manufacturer, Hydrosmart in Adelaide."
Hydrosmart's technology incorporates some of the latest advances in particle physics research. It uses computer generated resonance frequencies focused in the flow via antennae wound in tight coils around the treated water pipe with no flow restrictions.
It works at the molecular level to neutralise the bonding ability of minerals or chemicals in the water. Without their bonding mechanism large mineral crystals become unstable and reduce to tiny sub four micron particles. The flow takes on the properties of soft water and becomes readily available to plants without blocking their capillaries.
The Moore's installed a 20 mm unit on the output pipe from the bore and connected it to the existing irrigation system on their one acre block. They have been very happy with the results.
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"We simply wouldn't have had a garden by now without the bore and the Hydrosmart. Everything is growing well and some things have really thrived on the conditioned water."
At Ballarat Golf Club the background to the story is a little different but with a similar outcome. Their bore was put down in 1959 and salt levels have varied between 900 and 1200 ppm, reasonably low, but higher than ideal. Over the years the water from the bore has only been used as a backup and had always been mixed with stormwater collected on the course.
But this summer there was no stormwater for mixing. Closing the course seemed the only option because the bore water would be too salty for the delicate greens. However, course Superintendent Jeff Powell, remembered reading about Hydrosmart technology some years ago.
"We installed a conditioning unit for them at the end of November," Paul Pearce of Hydrosmart said. "All the comments are positive. Jeff tells me the Poa annua is very susceptible to salt but in his words they are 'healthy as' The bore puts 400 litres a minute into a storage dam and from there it's pumped through the Hydrosmart. Jeff is cutting the greens twice a week and says he is getting lots of comments about how well the course looks."
The 5th green at Ballarat Golf Club
Paul said that Jeff also reported that the ground seemed to remain wetter for longer with the conditioned water. He is looking at installing interjection equipment so that a wetting agent can be added to further improve effectiveness.
Hydrosmart is now shipping units into the region on an almost daily basis. The application of the technology is being driven by a desire to bring saline bores into production during extreme drought circumstances, but it could have far reaching consequences. In the future, large reserves of previously unusable groundwater could become available for productive agricultural use. Droughts always teach us something!
March/April 2007 Golf and Sports Turf Australia 23
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