A lake in southern New South Wales is full of water at the moment but it's not because of recent heavy rainfall.
So far this financial year, Moulamein grower Jeremy Morton has directed 1,675 megalitres of his irrigation water into the ephemeral lake on his parent's property where the family grows rice as well as other crops.
About 1,000 megalitres of the precious resource, fed to the Morton land via channel from the Murray River irrigation system, has flowed into the waterway in the past two months.
"First and foremost, it's about water for production. But certainly it's got an environmental benefit too," Mr Morton said.
Mr Morton had 240 hectares of rice in the ground at his Moulamein property in the NSW Riverina and is half way through harvesting the crop.
Irrigators in the Murray Darling Basin are given their set water allocations each year but whether they receive their full entitlement depends on how much water is in the system.
This year, Mr Morton's family purchased water on the open market early in the season but when good rain fell, he had plenty in surplus.
"I've had 250 millimetres of rain already this year so I haven't needed to irrigate anything this year," Mr Morton said.
Morton's Lake was once a popular spot for water skiing and filled naturally roughly once every three years, but since the Millennium drought, which lasted from 2001 to 2009, water has only made its way there on three occasions.
Shelter for endangered frogs
Mr Morton expected water birds to flock to the lake but other animals would benefit too, inlcuding some that are endangered in NSW.
"We have Southern Bell Frogs in an adjoining water body to this one, which is shallower and covered in tall spike rush and scattered red gum. So it's ideal Southern Bell Frog habitat and there may well be some Australasian bitterns [a type of bird] in there too," he said.
Mr Morton said it was now easy to extract water from the lake to use for farming purposes.
"But we've had almost no opportunity in the last 20 years to use that licence because it's been so dry, and there's been such infrequent flooding."
Lakes can lose water through evaporation and seepage, but Mr Morton wasn't too concerned.
"The vegetation will probably use more in the next few months, but once it starts to warm up, evaporation in this part of the world is somewhere around a metre and a half a year."
Future plans not certain
It's difficult to predict how frequently Mr Morton would be able to fill the lake with irrigation water but he hoped to do so when water was abundant or cheap to buy.
"There's enough times when we've received zero allocation and certainly can't afford to be putting water into it, but then that sort of works because you end up getting a natural drying phase, which is probably not a bad thing either," he said.
