This program of erosion control works on members’ farms has been proudly funded by the NSW Environmental Trust ($99,000 for ET stage 1) and South East Local Land Services ($27,000 to fence, plant and seed earthworks and gullies – project SELLS). It was done concurrently with ET stage 2 funded by the Environmental Trust for $170,000 and the federal Murray Darling Healthy Rivers program ($50,000 – project MDHR). ET1 has run from 2019 to 2024.
The main aim of the program has been to reduce the amount of sediment leaving farms via erosion gullies and ending up in Hovells Creek and the Lachlan River. A 2016 report by the Department of Primary Industries found that there is a 170+ km sand slug in the Lachlan that has filled in all the aquatic places of refuge for drier years as well as all the Murray Cod breeding holes. It has many other negative impacts on numerous threatened and other aquatic and riparian species of plants and animals.
Other major benefits of the program are keeping more water and soil on farms and stabilising vulnerable areas, providing more shade and sequestering carbon by planting more trees and shrubs.
The works are all aimed at slowing the flow of water through the landscape and have included:
- battering the sides of deep gullies to flatten them
- shaping the landscape to spread the water flow instead of concentrating it
- constructing rollover drains on shaped land
- building a rock groyne and a rock riffle
- building rock-lined channels on Geotech fabric
- building dams with trickle pipes low in the dam wall
- building leaky weirs and leaky dams (leaky weir project still in progress)
Project Updates
Sand deposited from Hovells Creek into the Lachlan River at the junction of the two waterways and at Cowra 2024.
