Water delivery to Gunbar is becoming more efficient as Murrumbidgee Irrigation has begun phasing out its canals in the wake of a pipeline project.
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Gunbar's farms and stock industry is increasingly being supplied via a pipeline project run by the non-for-profit cooperative group known as the Gunbar Private Water Supply Board (GPWSB).
The pipeline was initially a project owned by MI and was given over to the GPWSB following the line's completion.
The pipeline runs from the Murrumbidgee River with water traveling through filtration hubs before running through around 280 kilometers of main line piping which supplies around 1500 kilometers of on-farm piping and tanks in Gunbar.
The pipeline is now up and running and is currently supplying water to around 34 farms in Gunbar with a total of about 39 customers, many of whom attended a session at the Gunbar Pioneer Memorial Church on Monday to sign their water use agreements.
Since acquiring the pipeline the GPWSB have promised the project will deliver cleaner water.
GPWSB operations manager James Bisset said the use of on-farm tanks and troughs will also reduce the amount of water farmers are losing to evaporation and seepage when compared to their dams.
Most importantly water will also be delivered to the farms without the massive losses of water being required for conveyance, as was the case for MI's open irrigation canals.
GPWSB chairman Don Low said the losses of water to conveyance is the whole reason MI has refused to continue delivering water to Gunbar.
"MI came to us and said we can't keep on delivering that amount of water out there and losing all that water, this is an inefficient way of doing it," Mr Low said.
"If MI started charging us in the losses in conveyance fees that they faced we (farmers) couldn't do it."
"The whole area had an allocation of 2000 megalitres and we used to use somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 megalitres a year."
"You can see that as a shareholder for Murrumbidgee Irrigation that a lot of other shareholders wouldn’t be too happy if we are getting about six times the allocation they were getting," Mr Low said.
He said MI funded the pipeline, trading 9000 megalitres from their 10,000 megalitre conveyance licence.
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