The strident campaign to increase environmental flows in the Murray Darling Basin has left many irrigators feeling like "common criminals", former NFF president and leading farm businessman, Peter Corish, said this week.
Speaking at the NFF’s first national congress in Brisbane, Mr Corish said "grassroots" irrigators had been largely excluded from the current water reform process and many believed they were now seen as "rapers and pillagers" in the wider community.
He said the reputations of irrigators had been sullied by extreme environmentalists and sections of the media in their crusade to divert more water to the environment.
Many irrigators without direct links to farmer organisations hadn't been consulted during the water reform negotiations which stretched back to the early 1990s and which had produced major changes in how water was allocated, traded and managed.
Many of these irrigators had struggled to keep up with the pace of change during the past 15 years and some had quit the industry.
Mr Corish said irrigators had a responsibility to keep themselves informed on the reforms and the impact on their businesses but governments and farm bodies like the NFF had also failed to communicate effectively with grassroots farmers about the changes.
These farmers had been left confused and fearful of their future by the massive shift in philosophy about water use in the past two decades, which had stripped water from irrigation in favour of extra environmental flows.
Irrigators were critical to Australia's food production and needed certainty in water supply to keep investing to make their farms more water efficient, he said.
Mr Corish, a major irrigator from Goondiwindi on the NSW-Qld border and chairman of the publicly-listed farming company, PrimeAg Australia, said the reform program had produced some beneficial outcomes including addressing serious over-allocation of water and providing security for irrigation entitlements.
Nor did he oppose the recent government buybacks of water which had been made at market prices, a much better outcome than the compulsory acquisition of licences.
But the buybacks had occurred with seemingly little socio-economic analysis of their impact and little scientific backing of their environmental merit, he said.
Dr Richard Davis, senior science advisor to the National Water Commission, told the congress that scientists had failed, despite 30 to 40 years of research, to nail down the exact value of increased flows to the environment.
Australia didn't know how much water was needed for the environment or what impact that water would have.
Environmental water needed to be subjected to the same efficiency scrutiny and guidelines as water used in farming, he said.
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