Current drought and competing water demands in most parts of Australia have put enormous pressure on water resources, and consequently all major cities and most towns are now under severe water restrictions and the availability of water for irrigation has been significantly impacted.

Growing concerns among community groups, researchers and policy makers to use water more efficiently and effectively have lead to considerable work done to reduce the application losses through better design and selection of appropriate irrigation methods.
Costly irrigation systems and laser land levelling to improve control and distribution of water within the farm boundaries and beyond. Future policies are designed to increase reuse of effluent, develop ways to use lower quality water and improve the overall productivity of water use for irrigation to cope with future water scarcity.

In the past there was limited research on reducing the losses due to evaporation and transpiration- although over 90% of the water stored within the root zone is consumed by these processes.