WATER SUPPLY VITAL

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31107, 9 July 1966, Page 8

WATER SUPPLY VITAL

'THE provision of an adequate supply of drinking water was one of the basic requirements of intensive pastoral farming, Mr H. R. Wise, a consulting engineer, of Oamaru, said in a paper to the hill country development conference at Waipara. Stock could live with little feed so long as they had adequate water. For a sheep in a dry spell allowance had to be made for a gallon of water a day, for dry cattle 10 gallons a day and for a dairy cow up to 20 gallons a day. In North Otago in the last 10 years he said that eight rural water supply schemes had been installed supplying 850 country properties covering 170,000 acres at a capital cost of £230,000 or 27s an acre. The water was sold at an average annual cost of £ll 5s a point receiving 400 gallons a day, which was equivalent to 146,000 gallons a year at Is 6Jd for 1000 gallons. This charge covered all costs including interest, sinking fund and maintenance.

In North Otago Mr Wise said that the schemes were designed with a pump capacity of 2 gallons a minute a 1000 acres, which provided enough water for three sheep to the acre over the whole area.

It had been found in the extreme drought conditions at the end of 1964 there had still been a third of the pumping capacity unused after a scheme . had been in use for five years. Mr Wise said that last year Mr G. T. Mars, assistant district officer of the Meat and Wool Boards’ Economic Service, had carried out an investigation into the results achieved in North Otago during the eight years since the first scheme was installed. Be-

tween June, 1956, just prior to the completion of the first scheme, to June, 1963, one year after completion of the sixth scheme sheep numbers had increased by 22 per cent to one million. During the same period in the Waipara county where terrain and climate were somewhat similar but without water supply schemes, the sheep increase was 10 per cent. The end of 1964 and the beginning of last year had I seen the climax of the worst) drought in North Otago for 48 years with the rainfall in 1964 being only 13.3 inches. The Department of Agriculture considered that without these schemes during this critical period 500,000 sheep would have had to be shifted south for grazing. To transport these back a subsidy of 5s a head was available from the Government and this would have cost the country £125,000 or £45,000 more than the subsidy paid for the installation of these schemes. Mr Wise said that a Government subsidy of £1 for £2 was available towards the capital cost of such schemes subject to certain conditions. These included that to qualify for a subsidy a scheme had to include at least four farmers holding in aggregate not less than 2000 acres. An economic survey carried out by the Department of Agriculture had to show that when operative the scheme would make possible a worthwhile increase in primary production. In North Otago the estimated increase had ranged from 9 to 30 per cent in the value of gross production. The favoured supply system is that known as the constant flow or restrictor system by which each consumer is supplied with a maximum pre-

determined quantity of water each day delivered into a' tank or tanks on his property: at a uniform rate over the 24 hours. The consumer provides the tank or tanks to receive the water and also reticulates his own farm from the tanks. I