NESTLED between forests of red gum and Australia's mightiest inland river, Phil O'Neill's dairy farm is called Murray Eden.
Its grasses are usually outrageously lush, the cows sleek with groaning udders. "I don't like to blow my own trumpet, but it's pretty well known through the Barham district as one of the prettiest farms when things are right," Mr O'Neill said.
But things are not right. The Eden comes courtesy of irrigation water from the Murray River. Catchment inflows are the lowest on record and the dairy industry takes almost 40 per cent of the water used in food production in Australia.
"Without water, we are basically living in a desert here," Mr O'Neill said of his farm on the NSW side of the river, about 65 kilometres downstream of Moama.
"We get less than 13 inches [330 millimetres of rainfall per year on average]. It's dusty and you can see where the hay trails are [for feeding the cows] and basically bloody dirt."
If there is no irrigation water available over the next year, dairies such as Mr O'Neill's and vast permanent plantings of grapes and citrus along the Murray could disappear, shattering rural towns that rely on them.
For Mr O'Neill, the Prime Minister's words of doom and gloom about the Murray-Darling yesterday came as no surprise.
Last year there was hardly any irrigation water available to grow pasture and he had to borrow heavily to buy feed.
If good rain does not fall by the end of next month, Mr O'Neill will have to think seriously about selling his farm because, at 50, he does not want to further reduce his equity by borrowing more.
Just 12 months ago the Barham district had about a dozen dairy farms. "We are down to six or seven now and I think in the next few months we will lose two or three more," Mr O'Neill said.
The Mayor of the local Wakool Shire Council, Ken Trewin, is demanding the Federal Government declare a Murray-Darling Basin state of emergency. "They need to take control over the whole system … we are in an absolutely diabolical situation."
Cr Trewin was part of a delegation that went to Canberra last year to warn that the Murray was going to run dry. He said the way the states had squabbled over water and squandered it was "absolutely incompetent management".
Lester Wheatley, the Deniliquin-based chairman of the Murray Valley Community Action Group, said the Federal Government had to start planning investment such as new roads to maintain jobs and money in irrigation towns if there is no water.