CASCADE in the Shire of Esperance became the 12th area in Western Australia to be declared water deficient, after an announcement from the State government earlier this week.
The declaration follows an application from the Esperance Shire on behalf of five farmers in the Cascade area and comes just days after one was made for the Gairdner area in the Jerramungup Shire.
It will see the State government cart 640 kilolitres of water each week from the Water Corporation's scheme at Norseman in the Goldfields region, starting yesterday.
Water Minister Dave Kelly said the impact of climate change on reducing rainfall in is clear in the South Eastern region, from Grass Patch and Kukerin to Lake Grace and now Cascade.
"Like these other areas with declarations already in place, Cascade has been especially dry over the past two years," Mr Kelly said.
"According to rainfall figures from the Bureau of Meteorology's Kanga Downs Station, 5.8 kilometres from Cascade, the area has experienced two consecutive years of well-below average rainfall.
"Normally averaging 400 millimetres, the past two years have seen consecutive record low levels of rainfall (212mm in 2019 and 302mm in 2018)."
Cascade farmer Tom Carmody said the area was close to being declared water deficient in February, but picked up just enough rain to get a little bit of water run off into the Cascade community dam, which held off the declaration until now.
"The past three years have been well below average, we haven't had any decent running rains, enough to get water running into our catchments, there has been a bit here and there, but it has been drier than normal and possibly windier than normal as well," Mr Carmody said.
"There has been obvious lower yields due to drier finishes, but it's also meant we've had to be a lot more careful with our water for stock and the past six or eight weeks we've had to cart water from the Cascade dam.
"Once our key dams on farm dried up, we started carting about 36,000 litres a week and blending that 50/50 with a brackish spring that is on the edge of one of our farms."
Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan said this twelfth water deficiency declaration highlights the climatic challenges facing farmers.
"While there has been widespread rainfall in recent weeks, there simply has not been enough to produce runoff into dams," Ms MacTiernan said.
"This is a unique situation to have so many water deficiency declarations over such a wide area of the grainbelt and we are working together with industry and government agencies to assist landholders to adapt to a changing climate."
At his property, Mr Carmody crops about 3,600 hectares of wheat, barley, canola and beans, plus at the moment they have about 300 head of cattle.
"We also have a cattle station at Wiluna and we bring young stock from there down to the farm in Cascade and run them on a couple of pasture paddocks and a feedlot," he said.
"Last year in Wiluna was the driest on record for our station, we had 36mm of rain for the year and effectively no rain for the six months before that, so really for 18 months we had bugger all.
"We had to bring a lot of stock to Cascade and while we were having a dry spell down here, we could at least keep them alive because they would have perished in Wiluna due to lack of feed, but that did increase the pressure on our water supply on farm down here."
Water being carted under water deficiency declarations is strictly for emergency livestock and, if required, local firefighting emergencies.
