Drive through the Burdekin area in north Queensland and you'll see lots of tall grass, sugarcane. With 650 growers, it's the country's largest sugar growing region.
Fish and other wildlife have problems sharing the area though because creeks have been turned into irrigation channels and wetlands have yielded to cane. But Vince and Rita Papale are giving back some land to nature.
"It was getting far more difficult to manage that area of land. In a flood event this year we lost 10 to 15 acres of cane. We would try and pump the water clear of the paddocks and lose the crop anyway," says farmer Vince Papale. He and his wife Rita applied for Australian Government Reef Rescue funding from their local land and water management group, NQ Dry Tropics, to build a wetland in part of this area.
The wetland will cover three hectares of their farm, the lagoon itself will cover half that. The deepest part of the lagoon is four and a half metres. Aquifers lie three metres under much of the Burdekin but the wetland will be lined with clay to stop its water from influencing the quality and quantity of the watertable.
Planning, mapping and excavation costs have blown out to over $100,000, 30 per cent more than originally budgeted. This is mostly due to the discovery of mild acid sulphate soils in the area. The design had to be redone and the soil remediated with lime. The costs have been footed by NQ Dry Tropics through Reef Rescue and the landholder. The local water board is providing machinery at a subsidised rate.
Wetlands have been built in other cane farming regions but this is the first for the Burdekin. While crocodiles and fish shouldn't take too long moving in, it's expected to take three years before the lagoon reaches its full potential, complete with native plants like melaleucas, lomandras and water lillies.
It's the middle of the harvest season and Vince and Rita are working 14 hour days building the wetland and getting the cane crop in. Vince says they considered a recycling pit (something other farmers are doing to catch the water that runs off paddocks and redistributes it back onto the land so that it doesn't run off into the adjacent Great Barrier Reef) but he says he wanted something more environmentally friendly.
Vince says, "recycling pits are a hole in the ground. There's a whole lot more we can do with this. If you imagine the pressure we're under from environmental lobby groups and you think 'I can do something that proves we can coexist with everything around us'. It's a site you can bring people to and show them the cane's there and there's the wetland."
Vince also says working with NQ Dry Tropics has introduced him to people who have a lot of technical know-how - people he thinks should be more involved in farmers' lives. He says he's determined to improve the relationship between them and farmers in future.
Bob Frazer, NQ Dry Tropics Chief Executive Officer, said that the constructed wetland is a great move forward for cane growers in the region. “We hope that this example will encourage other growers to follow suit,” he said.
The wetlands construction project was funded by NQ Dry Tropics through the Australian Government’s Caring for our Country ‘Reef Rescue’ program.
9 October 2009
