2000s Australian drought

San Diego, they're at the end of the pipeline, so to speak, on all this distribution system, and they're, they're- Options are less, so they're building this big ocean desal plant in Carlsbad, which is the largest, um, s- uh, seawater r- reclamation plant in the Western Hemisphere.

Australia went through the Millennium Drought, 10 years of drought, and all the big cities there, Perth, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne...

I'm missing one.

There's five.

first took you down the holistic farming natural capital path michael

yeah i suppose it was probably a culmination of i left uni in the early 2000s and went back into our farm on the riverina in the millennium drought and just knew that things weren't working you know we were feeding a lot of livestock watching our resource degrade in front of us and we weren't really making a lot of money so i started looking for different ways to do things and then in 2010 i stumbled across the holistic management So that's probably what led me to it.

And then when I started investigating that, probably being a pretty big sceptic of it all the time, it started to sit really well with me and the people I saw doing it were doing really well.

And it's obviously become every day is a new day of learning.

LAUGHTER So Bonnie Doon's funnier because we couldn't do it.

People, why didn't you do a sequel? And one of the reasons is because the Millennium Drought hit after we finished filming and the water was about 17 kilometres further downstream.

Yeah, nowhere near it.

It's still not great up there.

So for those people that wouldn't understand what that progression over that period of time, what happened? What happened taking 250 farms, dairy farms, down to five over the course of, what is it, 70

years? Probably the big change was the millennium drought.

was when things started to really change.

So when we say millennium drought, we're talking 2000, 2010.

So we went through a period of extended dry years and very dry years.

So totally changed the landscape.

So was it that period of time that was the most significant change in terms of the water as a commodity changing? So going back, maybe let's explain what water rights look like.

um what are they and what was the change what was the change that actually happened so you're on the farm my understanding was that you the the land back in the day you had access to water rights yes but they weren't necessarily a commodity that was tradable on a market yes so