The project, partly jointly funded by Land and Water Australia and the Grains Research and Development Corporation to the tune of $181,408 (with a total budget of $473517), will see Murdoch firmly on the national stage of salinity research for the first time.

It will be headed by the School of Environmental Science’s Associate Professor Dr Richard Bell and Murdoch University Research Fellow Dr Christopher Clarke, and will see close collaboration between the natural resource management agencies from every state in Australia, CSIRO, and the University of Melbourne (UniMelbourne).

Dryland salinity will affect one third of agricultural land in South-western WA, when it reaches its predicted maximum extent, and is estimated to cost the community up to $1 billion per annum.

Dr Clarke said the primary aim of the national project was to complete the development of an innovative and very simple computer program known as Flowtube which will be available on the Web.

“Flowtube will provide reliable advice to farmers, simply and quickly at the farm kitchen table, about their best methods for combating dryland salinity,” said Dr Clarke.

“Salinisation will cause a revolution in farming practice and sadly, it is a situation that I believe farmers will have to face come what may – they will have no choice in the matter.

“Either they must change their work practices now, to slow or halt the advance of the salt, or they will be forced to adopt salt land agronomy on salinised land.”

He said a third alternative: not changing farming methods and buying up your neighbour’s land to replace your lost land, would probably not be acceptable to the community because of the high social and economic costs through rural depopulation and the $1 billion loss.

Dr Clarke recommended new farming practices include the replacement of the current cropping-annual pasture cycles, with deep-rooted, perennial pastures grown for a few years, in phases, with intensive cropping regimes.

“This new agronomy should be carried out in bays - probably 50 metres wide - between belts of trees, a technique known as alley farming,” he said.

But for farmers to abandon a system that had served their families well for generations - albeit at a high environmental cost - they needed to have confidence the changes would work.

“Due to the complex combinations of treatment, landscape and climate types, a computer model is the only way this can be done in the short term.”

Flowtube was originally developed by Warrick Dawes of CSIRO and although simple in concept, it was difficult to operate.

The Department of Agriculture WA (DAWA) has commissioned Dr Robert Argent of UniMelbourne to ensure Flowtube is as simple as possible to operate for the ways in which salinity develops in WA.

The new project will see thorough testing of the program to make it usable for the Eastern States as well as WA.

Dr Clarke, Dr Richard George of DAWA and Dr Tom Hatton of CSIRO gave advice to the WA State Salinity Council on the effectiveness of treatments to combat salinity in 1999.

This was incorporated into the State Salinity Strategy released in April 2000.