00:00 For decades, one of the most tedious jobs on a cotton property has been doing the siphons.
00:07 It's a simple system using air pressure and gravity to move water from a channel over
00:12 a bank and down furrows to water cotton plants.
00:17 Siphons are cheap and portable, but also a very labour-intensive way to irrigate.
00:23 It's really been difficult for farms to get people who were prepared to go out and start
00:28 doing a siphon's hard work as well.
00:30 It can be long hours and just intensive going around the clock for long time frames.
00:35 The starting part is the easy bit, anyone can do that, but naturally having it done
00:41 you know efficiently and effectively takes a little bit of skill to manage.
00:48 The rural labour shortage and water savings are pushing more growers to retire siphons
00:54 and go bankless.
00:56 This means removing the bank and levelling the paddock so water flows under its own momentum
01:02 along the furrows.
01:03 I believe that you can go from 10 people to one in a comparison you know, so 10% of your
01:09 previous labour force.
01:11 So yeah, unbelievable for the labour side of it.
01:16 Irrigation designer Glenn Lyons pioneered bankless design around his home base of St
01:21 George.
01:22 It was then when he took inspiration from rice paddies in the Riverina to solve a problem
01:27 for a client.
01:28 Oh it's exciting, yeah, at this time yeah, because it's 20 years of work that's now coming
01:37 to fruition and really yeah, starting to get out there.
01:41 It's taken me a while to get this clear in my head but this is how it works.
01:45 The irrigation water comes in through this pipe and pulls in here.
01:49 This is a distribution basin and while it looks very shallow, when the water has peaked
01:54 it'll be above my knee.
01:57 Then the water moves down the furrows, watering this bay.
02:00 When the bay is done, the gates at the top and bottom of the next bay are opened and
02:06 the water, because Glenn's design has a built in fall, moves into the next bay, waters that
02:13 one, then gates are opened and closed in the next bay and so on.
02:17 And under the siphon system, water would move at about 100 metres every hour.
02:22 Under this system, it moves at 200 metres an hour.
02:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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