To put Georgia in context, at 69,700sqkm it is only about 1000sqkm bigger than Tasmania – but with a population of 3.7 million (compared with Tasmania’s 545,000).
And that’s where the similarities end.
Tasmania has 24 per cent of the state’s land in farming – about 1.7 million hectares.
Georgia’s current arable component is just 4.46 per cent – or about 310,000ha.
In 1992 it was 11.4 per cent, at 795,000ha.
Yet here is a country steeped in agricultural history: it is considered the cradle of the world’s wine industry, having started production more than 6000 years ago.
And for broadacre farming it can be seen as a pioneer in irrigated agriculture, with reports about its earliest works as far back as in the first century BC.
The Greek traveller and geographer Strabo (who died in AD24) wrote, “This country is more irrigated by river and other waters than Babylon and Egypt.”
Records show construction of canals started in the second half of the first millennium.
In the 12th century, Georgia’s King Tamar ordered construction of a 20km canal, followed by the king’s 119km Alazani canal, with parts of both medieval canals still in existence.
So with a track record that impressive, why was a delegation of Georgian government and scientific experts roaming the Murray earlier this month, from Mildura to Kerang, seeking inspiration on how to better irrigate their country?
Well, the Murray Darling Basin (which includes Sunraysia) accounts for 60 per cent of all irrigated land in Australia, with 1.2 million hectares (of which about 280,000ha is used for pastures and cereal crops).
In 1990 Georgia had 500,000ha of cereals, grapes, vegetables, nuts and citrus under irrigation.
Barely two years later a combination of secession from Soviet Russia, a coup and a civil war saw that figure collapse to 43,000ha.
As the nascent nation struggled to assert its independence and build an economy, it was quickly faced with the threat of food and water insecurity (not to mention that as of this week, the Russian military still occupies about 20 per cent of the country).
All of which means it’s urgent that Georgia upgrade its dilapidated flood irrigation network to a modern pressurised drip-feed system using industry best practice.
The scale of what Georgia is planning is breathtaking for a country of this size, population and potential.
Projects include modernising the Zemo Samgori irrigation scheme east of Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, to restore irrigation services and provide the basis for agricultural development in the region.
It’s planned that the project will enhance water resilience in the face of less upstream water availability and more water demand because of climate change impacts.
If successful, it will restore 19,129ha of existing agricultural land.
At its peak, the system (before the Soviet collapse) was 50,000 ha.
In 2021 just 5320ha were irrigated.
Sunraysia is a major horticultural centre notable for producing 80 per cent of Victoria’s grapes – and most of Australia’s dried grapes, with more than 300 growers producing dried grapes from around 3500ha of irrigated land across north-west Victoria and south-west New South Wales.
The project is expected to enable a sustainable increase in agricultural productivity through the water vector, with particular regard to the efficient management of natural resources (arable land, water, fertiliser and other agricultural inputs) achieved through modernisation of existing irrigation infrastructure.
This will enable the shift towards an increased and diversified primary production, due to the improvement and expansion of irrigated areas and the crop pattern changes.
It is also expected to create significant permanent employment opportunities and a high positive impact on the economic resilience of local communities with great agricultural potential currently not being realised due to the bad condition of water-conveying infrastructure.
Which brings us back to that delegation, and what it was doing in Mildura, Swan Hill and Cohuna, which would all play a pivotal role for the fact-finding group and its intensive tour of Sunraysia and the wider region for guidance in returning the small eastern European country’s irrigated agriculture industry to its former glory.
Speaking in Swan Hill, Georgia’s head of the Hydro-melioration and Land Management Department, Gizo Chelidze, said that was what brought his group to Australia and north-west Victoria.
Mr Chelidze said Georgian officials, while agreeing to adopt the innovative system, wanted to see firsthand how a closed pipeline system operated and to learn from the Australian experience before implementing it in his country.
He said the purpose of the trip, funded by Asia Development Bank (technical assistance), was to visit modern, piped-irrigation schemes looking at the construction, operation, maintenance, technology, pipe fittings and different agricultural uses of the technology here.
And between Mildura and Swan Hill, then on through Kerang and Cohuna, the Georgians were left in no doubt about how the agricultural industries the length of the Murray had embraced the technology.
“We have seen Australian irrigation applied to maize, grapes, fruit, almonds and pasture and we have been visiting different organisation structures and operation methods,” Mr Chelidze said.
“Where possible we have also visited smaller farms and gravity systems, which compared well with Georgia.
“In summary, the innovative system we are looking to adopt is a gravity closed pipe network using HDPE welded pipes.
“This will deliver pressurised supply to hydrants serving 5ha with sufficient capacity to almost enable ‘water on demand’.
“That’s where farmers will directly connect to the hydrants, which will serve five to 10 farmers per hydrant, with flow sufficient for one to three farms to operate irrigation at the same time.”
For such a small state, Georgia, incredibly as far as its climate and soil profiles go, between the west and east is like chalk and cheese.
The western half is plains set on the Black Sea and requires significant drainage problem before it can be successfully farmed.
The east is hilly to mountainous and dry and in winter can sink to -17°C at higher altitudes and in summer can reach 38°C.
The west is classified as a humid subtropical zone with annual rainfall of 1000–2500mm (recorded in exceptional years above 4000mm), with most falling in autumn.
The climate varies significantly with elevation, and while much of the lowland west is relatively warm throughout the year, the foothills and mountainous areas (including both the Greater and the Lesser Caucasus Mountains) experience cool, wet summers and snowy (up to 2m in depth) winters.
Eastern Georgia has a transitional climate from humid subtropical to continental, with its weather patterns influenced both by dry Caspian air masses from the east and by humid Black Sea air masses from the west.
The penetration of humid air from the Black Sea is often blocked by the mountain ranges (Likhi and Meskheti) which divide the eastern and western parts of the nation.
Georgia Amelioration Ltd head of international projects management office, Mikheil Margvelashvili, said Georgia’s traditional system of open channels and flood irrigation had to change because the country could not afford even to lose water to evaporation, let alone deal with issues from inefficient water management to water theft (mostly through illegal pumping).
Mr Margvelashvili said that meant replacing the open channels with pipes, introducing pressurised irrigation and demonstrating to Georgian farmers the savings in both cost and time.
He said this would not happen overnight but the government was taking it in manageable bites – a step at a time.
“The goal is to have irrigated farming back to 200,000ha by 2025 and the Australian technology and implementation we have seen is very encouraging,” Mr Margvelashvili said.
“But as well as our inherent problems, Georgia is also being confronted by climate change – in the past 10 years the nation’s reservoirs have no longer been filling.
“Also, much of our water is glacially fed, and our glaciers are no longer stable: they are melting and losing size, and that is very bad news for our country.
“Whether this is cyclical or a permanent change, only time will tell.
“Hydro electricity supplies much of our power and in winter, when it is really needed for heating, many of the rivers are frozen so we are power=deficient and have to import energy – and that’s a real cost.”
All the delegation members were amazed by sights around Mildura, such as citrus and grapes growing alongside each other – in Georgia they have to be grown at opposite ends of the country because of weather.
There was also strong interest in the wine grapes, with archaeologists having traced the world’s first known wine creation back to the people of the South Caucasus in 6000BC.
Mr Margvelashvili said the masterplan was to develop Georgian irrigated food from almost total domestic consumption to surplus production and the opportunity to export – where he said the money was to be made.
He said after the loss of the Russian market for most of the nation’s wine production, Georgian growers had to dramatically boost the quality of their end product to make it attractive as an export.
Today it is sold to all the countries around Georgia, from Russia to Turkey and to Europe and Asia.
Asian Development Bank’s Georgia-based senior project officer Avtandil Tskhvitava can proudly rattle off his country’s long and productive agricultural story: grapes (wine and table), wheat, horticulture, grazing land, pistachios, almonds, citrus, fruit and on and on – sounding just like Sunraysia.
Mr Tskhvitava is a strong supporter of the government’s step-by-step renaissance: it’s just a matter of timing, particularly in response to its loss of glacial renewal and the falling level of its reservoir storage capacity.
He said while Georgia had its long-established, gravity-fed open canals, the country didn’t even want to face losses through evaporation.
“While we have some drip and sprinkler irrigation, we rely too much on flood irrigation and those open channels which we must replace,” Mr Tskhvitava said.
“We get most of our rain in the west but need the water in the east – meaning climate change and the changing profile of our water reserves is a major issue for us,” he said.
“But whether that is cyclical, we don’t know, and we can’t plan that it is so we must turn to the more efficient use of piped water.
“Everything we have seen and heard here along the Murray shows us in western Georgia we have the ideal natural slopes around our major farmland to be irrigated, so much so we can have natural pressure into which irrigators can tap.
“If we get that efficiency right it can make such a difference.
“The east is more hilly, where we also run sheep in the mountainous country and cattle on the plains.”
Mr Tskhvitava said the Ukraine war was impacting countries throughout the region and disrupting all sorts of logistics, from power and energy through to agricultural production – another aspect which must be factored into Georgia’s immediate planning.
He said with parts of the country still occupied by Russia, Georgia was part of the protracted hostilities almost by default.
“But we must press ahead because agriculture, and export agriculture in particular, is where the profits are.
“But this also will eventually mean addressing cultural practices.”
When part of the USSR, Georgia’s agriculture was ruled by state ownership and collective farming (although private agriculture survived there better than in many other satellite states).
Sadly, Georgia’s independence saw the collapse of its collective farms and its whole agricultural sector and the break up saw the re-emergence of many small operations.
By privatising all its agriculture as early as in 1992–93, Georgia created a sector which produces almost 100 per cent of output – up from 40 per cent before 1990.
Before the collapse of the Soviet empire, only 7 per cent of agricultural land was individual use.
A decade later, 37 per cent of agricultural land (or more than 70 per cent of arable land) is used by individual farmers.
However, the universality of land distribution to rural families also produced relatively small landholdings – making the average size of an individual farm in Georgia 0.96ha, with just 5 per cent of farms larger than 2ha.
Tour leader Rob Rendell, a founder of Bendigo-based environmental and agricultural consultancy RMCG, is working with the Georgians through the Australian Water Partnership, set up by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to better manage ‘small projects’.
Mr Rendell has been to Georgia consulting on this project three times in the past eight months and said the key here was that Georgia was modernising, not rehabilitating, its irrigation networks.
He said the biggest step for the Georgian agriculture industry was changing the irrigation system which had sustained its production system for generations to something “new”.
“That is the essence of this visit: to see not only that pressurised irrigation works but that it will work for them and they will be so amazed at how well it works they will all wonder why they’ve waited so long to make the change,” Mr Rendell said.
“The original Russian engineering was in fact very, very good – there are a few things Australia could learn from them – but it is no longer good enough.
“Working with the Georgians here and in their country has also been a learning experience for me.
“I’ve learnt a lot so I’m confident so will the people on this visit.”
