Irrigation and water supply monitoring for a 1,400-hectare Riverina cropping property — real-time licence compliance, pump protection, and overnight alerting replacing paper logs and reactive management.
Background
A family-operated mixed cropping property in the Riverina region of New South Wales runs approximately 1,400 hectares under irrigated production, primarily winter cereals and summer broadacre crops. The property draws surface water from a Murray–Darling tributary under a volumetric extraction licence, supplemented by groundwater from four registered bores.
Water management is central to the operation. The extraction licence carries annual and seasonal limits that are enforced by the state water authority, with penalties for overextraction and carryover restrictions that make end-of-year compliance reporting consequential. The farm uses a combination of surface irrigation and overhead pivot systems, fed through a network of pump stations, header tanks, and distribution infrastructure spread across the property.
Before the Fieldmouse deployment, water management was handled through a combination of manual meter reads (typically three times per week at each pump station), a paper log maintained by the irrigation manager, and a spreadsheet reconciled at the end of each month. A near-breach event in the previous season — when the operation came within 4% of its seasonal surface water limit before the monthly spreadsheet was reconciled — prompted the owners to look for a monitoring solution.
The Challenge
The Solution
Nine Fieldmouse devices were installed across all three surface water pump stations, all four bore pump stations, and the six header tanks. The deployment integrated with existing pulse-output water meters at each pump outlet and added pressure transducers to all storage tanks.
The Outcome
The near-breach risk that prompted the deployment has not recurred. In the first full season under Fieldmouse, the operation finished 11% below its surface water limit with full visibility throughout the season — not discovered after the fact.
Continuous-run and low-tank alerts have been triggered a combined nine times; in each case the pump was shut down before any damage occurred. The prior-season burnout costs of approximately $7,600 have not been repeated.
A pivot fault (stuck end-gun valve causing the pivot to stall) occurred at 11:30 pm on a Saturday. The fault alert reached the irrigation manager's phone within three minutes. The pivot was restarted remotely via a control relay output before any crop stress occurred.
14 months of extraction, run-time, and tank-level data now captured in the platform provides a historical record of operational patterns. The property owners describe this as the most tangible preparedness step taken ahead of the planned transition.
End-of-season licence reconciliation now takes two hours rather than a full day. All extraction data by source and by month is exported directly from the platform — no manual compilation, no cross-referencing paper logs.
Access to real-time bore vs surface water extraction rates has allowed the irrigation manager to optimise the balance between sources throughout the season — a strategy that was previously too difficult to manage without real-time metering at each pump station.
Whether you're managing a single bore or a complex multi-source licence, Fieldmouse connects directly to your existing meters and sensors. Get in touch to discuss your setup.
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