On-farm irrigation infrastructure programs have become an important method of recovering water for the environment in the Australian Murray-Darling Basin (MDB). These programs offer farmers funding to upgrade infrastructure in return for a portion of their water rights. This study measures the effects of Australian Government on-farm infrastructure programs in the southern MDB between 2009-2010 and 2016-2017, particularly the On-Farm Irrigation Efficiency Program. A novel dataset is constructed combining program administrative data with farm survey data. This data is used to derive econometric estimates on the effects of these programs on various measures of farm productivity, profitability and water demand. On-farm programs are found to have positive effects for participants in terms of higher farm productivity and profitability. However, the study also finds a Jevon's paradox outcome, where farm demand for water is significantly higher post-upgrade.

No abstract

This paper centres geological matter in questions of marginality, inequality, and structural racism in the US. I follow the entanglements of geological matter with bodies, emotion‐laden imaginaries of place, and histories of slavery and colonialism, to illustrate how contemporary Black lives are intimately connected to processes of mineral extraction. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman's concept of ‘afterlives’, I situate heightened levels of ambient toxicity from geological refinement and industrial waste as extractive afterlives, connecting commonly felt precarity around extractive worlds to broader questions of race, inequality, and connections to place. Citing academic and artistic accounts of life in Southern Louisiana, a historically Black region with a large petrochemical industry, I demonstrate the relevance of geological entanglements to experiences of structural racism in the US.