Young Achiever from Northern Australia Wins Irrigation Fellowship
A desire to ensure a sustainable future for irrigation in northern Australia has won Anna Price the prestigious 2006 Travel Fellowship. The Fellowship enables a young person to travel overseas and investigate an issue relevant to the irrigation industry. This annual Fellowship is sponsored by the National Program for Sustainable Irrigation (NPSI) and the Australian National Committee on Irrigation and Drainage (ANCID). Anna’s plan is to visit irrigation regions with similar climates to northern Australia, develop an understanding of their sustainability issues and how this might be used to improve irrigation in northern Australia.
Mr Denis Flett, Chair of NPSI, said, "Each Fellowship recipient has brought back valuable information about a particular field of research, which in turn, is fed back into the Australian irrigation industry for consideration, and where relevant, adopted."
Anna plans to use the scholarship to visit Malaysia, Brazil and Pakistan. "Indus, in Pakistan, is a much larger irrigation area than those of northern Australia. It has a wide variety of irrigation techniques and water sources (including surface water and groundwater), Anna said. "Northern Australia’s closeness to Asia offers economic advantages for the irrigation industry. However, social and cultural values need to be incorporated into any irrigation systems in northern Australia, to conserve the "wilderness" value of northern Australia and the associated recreational and economic activities," Anna said.
The research outcomes will also feed into the Northern Australia Irrigation Futures project, including the development of a sustainability framework for irrigation in northern Australia.
Stephen Mills, ANCID chairman and a member of the National Program for Sustainable Irrigation Program Management Committee, said applicants for the Fellowship had to demonstrate a knowledge and understanding of major strategic issues facing the industry in the next ten years. "We developed the Fellowship between ANCID and NPSI to give young people the chance to go overseas and learn all they can, and to bring that experience and knowledge back to Australia to share with our irrigation industries," said Mr Mills.
Last year’s Fellowship winner was Steven Falivene, who travelled to the United States and the home of drip irrigation in Israel to look at practical techniques to improve water management, focusing particularly on root zone management.
The National Program for Sustainable Irrigation is managed by Land & Water Australia on behalf of 14 partners, including irrigators, water authorities, research agencies, State and Commonwealth government agencies and commodity groups.
For more information, please contact:
Murray Chapman, National Program for Sustainable Irrigation on (03) 5763 3214; 0427633214; email: email@example.com