The Victorian Government is funding a $12 million initiative to link farm and catchment programs to irrigation modernisation for environmental and productivity benefits. The Linking Farm and Catchment Programs to Irrigation Modernisation Initiative is developing critical links between modernisation and broader catchment management and aligning them with Government policy and existing programs.

The initiative is integrating current farm engagement, extension and works programs with delivery modernisation programs. Activities include:

• Engaging irrigators and catchment managers in the modernisation process to understand how farm businesses will be affected.
• Ensuring farming and catchment communities take part in program design and delivery so that solutions to connect farms to the delivery system backbone promote private on-farm investment to increase productivity and resilience.
• Actively working with designers of infrastructure programs to build modernised infrastructure to suit short to medium term farm service needs, and adapt to unknown longer-term service needs.
• Designing new tools, instruments and approaches to enable the accelerated level of farm change required to meet modernisation objectives.
• Enhancing irrigator business decisions by providing access to grants for financial and business management advice, farm planning and some farm infrastructure works.

Environmental benefits are delivered by linking existing natural resource management (NRM) programs to infrastructure modernisation programs, including:

• Identifying where modernisation programs will have NRM impacts
• Managing negative impacts with new and existing tools
• Optimising the positive impacts
• Reporting on the overall natural resource management benefits generated by the integrated programs.