As readers are aware, after the rain in the Northern Darling Watershed, the NSW Government initially placed a ban on water harvesting from the flood plain and in the process called for Queensland to do the same. However, within days it caved in, allowing irrigators – primarily large cotton growers – to harvest water into storage, claiming to not do so could cause damage to irrigators’ storage infrastructure.

Apparently northern irrigators feared their storages would fill from flood plain flow without active intervention and that water-diverting infrastructure would be damaged if this infrastructure d