Basin water quality in jeopardyJust visualise the wastage
To visualize the enormous wastage that is occurring daily with free-flowing bores, I would like to just give an example of our bores, over the last few months.
We had a wonderful wet autumn – and over the last three months had so much surface water, from gilgis, creeks and rivers, that our cattle barely drank from a trough. When a bore is capped, the water is only released as stock actually drink at the trough.
We have five capped bores that would (if free-flowing) have flowed about 3 million litres a day. So the fact that they were capped, saved about 300 million litres of water, over just a few months.
That’s just a few average bores, in a short period of time, and that water would have been pouring out continuously, whether stock were drinking from it or not – TOTAL wastage.
So visualize the almost incredible wastage of many hundreds of huge flowing bores, gushing out constantly into drains where wastage of about 95% has been going on for over 100 years. Very many huge old bores outback are unregulated or abandoned, resulting in up to 100% wastage. Also many boredrains now flow through farming paddocks (unstocked), which also represents total wastage.