Last week I drove to the Northern Territory via Burke, Winton, Mount Isa and beyond.

There sure is a lot of water about at the moment. Throughout our farming country the grass is green but the eroded streams, a feature of so much of our landscape, are mostly dry or just intermittent puddles. The country that looks the best is where the water is pooling about on the flatlands up in the northwest.

Water is everybody's friend in the right amount but when it gets on the move and becomes a flood it causes expensive and heartbreaking havoc. We hear often of the irony of our country lurching from drought to flood within days or weeks but according to the theories of Peter Andrews, it should come as no surprise.

One of the most important principles of Natural Sequence Farming is the importance of slowing the movement of water through the landscape. It's a very simple principle – if the water rushes off the land where it falls it will gather strength and destructive potential as more water joins the flow. Heavy rain one day, a flood downstream the next and then back to drought when it all reaches the sea.

If Peter Andrews' ideas were adopted throughout our degraded farm waterways, a great deal of the recent rainfall would have been held up by weirs and in-stream structures and it would be there still, hydrating the farmland and moderating the flooding downstream. If anyone needs proof of this I have a video made by Peter Andrews, Martin Royds and myself which shows exactly how the system can and does work.

After we made the video in early May this year, we've had the terrific rainfall and the stream below Baramul Stud, that is, where Peter's work ends, has been severely eroded and washed into the sea.

Peter Andrews allows for floods being a natural part of the weather cycle and NSF demonstrates the way the Australian landscape coped by developing chains of ponds which moderated the water's flow and allowed vegetation to survive through periods of no rain. Then, when the big floods came, the water would spill out into the surrounding floodplain which slowed it and reduced its erosive effect.

There's a bit more to it than that of course but the point is – let’s get on with it.

And on another note, it would just be the greatest of all disasters, environmental and economic, if we stay in a wet cycle for long enough so that when the controversial desalination plant come on line we have nowhere to store the water.