Queensland’s former cotton farmer of the year, John Norman, 43, was charged on Tuesday with six counts of fraud involving commonwealth funds allocated for water efficiency projects under the Murray-Darling basin plan.
Norman owns an 18,000-hectare cotton aggregate outside Goondiwindi, near the New South Wales border.
Det Insp Mick Dowie said the arrests were the result of a long and complex investigation and police would allege fraudulent activity across six projects between 2010 and 2017.
One of Queensland’s largest irrigators expected to be charged with fraud Read more If found guilty, the two men face extended jail sentences.
He said some contractors’ invoices were allegedly amended either by the contractors themselves or by Norman Farming later.
“I am aware of the impact this will have on the small farming communities in the area and possible individuals.
John Norman’s immediate neighbours said they were relieved charges had been laid.
The charges are likely to ignite calls for an independent audit of the plan, already under pressure from the royal commission established by the former SA premier Jay Weatherill.
Littleproud has denied any personal conflict, saying the awarding of Healthy Headwaters grants was a state responsibility.
“Now that charges have been laid, the water minister, David Littleproud, should step aside to avoid any perceived conflict of interest,” she said.

From left: Divneel Ram, Rohini Devi, Rishika Devi and Kiran Wati take a walk along the arid land in Tavarau Ba on August 25, 2018.
Photo: Yogesh Chandra A Tavarau family in Ba are bracing for what they anticipate will be the worst drought to hit the Western Division.
“District officers from Lautoka have inspected the well and advised the family not to drink from it.” Mrs Wati said her family had been using the borehole for the past 25 years, however, the impact of this drought made it unsuitable to continue drinking from it.
“Everything is drying up in our fields.
If this continues, all our plants and animals will die,” she said.
Family member, Rohini Devi, 36, said they could not plant vegetables on their land now because of the water shortage and dry soil.
The family also raises livestock such as goats and cattle, however, the lack of proper grazing pasture has taken its toll as well.
“We constantly have to look for feed from elsewhere to feed our livestock.
“Despite this setback, the family is thankful to the Government for distributing clean drinking water to households during this severe drought.” For now all Mrs Wati, Ms Devi and family members can do is to pray for rain to provide water for their gardens and farm animals.
Edited by Percy Kean

"Information arising from fluctuations in rainfall moves through ecosystems, similar to the way that information flows through communication networks," said Praveen Kumar, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and study co-author.
"This type of analysis, which is new to ecological and hydrological studies, lets us determine how well different aspects of an ecosystem are connected and whether responses to changes in climate are site-specific or common across different ecosystems."
"At the Idaho site, we saw increased connectivity between the atmosphere and soil in the period directly after the rainfall," said Allison Goodwell, a civil engineering professor at the University of Colorado, Denver who is a former Illinois graduate student and lead author of the new study.
"At the Southern Sierra site, we found that heat and carbon fluxes responded to the drought in different ways, and that sources of connectivity varied between high- and low-elevation sites."
"Another aspect that made this study unique was the availability of data from multiple stations at different elevations at each site," Kumar said.
Although the field sites and data are from different ecosystems, times and weather disturbances, the study provides insight into how connectivity influences different types of fluxes, the researchers said.
"These results show the ways in which a watershed may respond to precipitation disturbances, in this case drought," said Richard Yuretich, the program director for the NSF Critical Zone Observatories.
The paper "Dynamic process connectivity explains ecohydrologic responses to rainfall pulses and drought" is available from the U. of I.
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‘s regions are now at the highest drought rating, with no significant rain in the forecast.
"We’re certainly not out of the woods yet."
Parts of the province had some rain over the weekend, but it did little to calm the wildfires or replenish streams and rivers.
The province has assigned a Level 4 drought rating to all of Vancouver Island, the Northeast, Northwest, Stikine and Skeena-Nass areas.
Streams hitting historical lows But this year, Cameron says all of B.C.
‘s coastal areas have been hit by drought, which could continue well into September.
"One of our concerns is that in fighting wildfires, access to water is required, so when you have dropping stream levels and dropping lake levels, the amount of water that’s available to fight wildfires becomes reduced," Cameron said.
While there is some rain forecast for the next seven days in parts of the province, both Cameron and Skrepnek said it won’t be enough to improve drought and fire conditions.
That’s not forecast right now," Cameron said.
Despite the drought conditions, the City of Vancouver is still at its lowest level of water restrictions, meaning residents can still water their lawns on prescribed days of the week, wash their cars and use power washers.

The next two weeks will be critical for people struggling through the drought in New South Wales.
Farmers are saying they can not find feed for their livestock beyond a few days’ supply.
Figures from online livestock selling company Auctions Plus show many producers have been offloading stock.
Farmers had ignored advice about de-stocking in recent weeks, Dr Davidson said.
"At that moment the cattle would have been fine to sell at a good price but some farmers have waited too long and now the cattle are emaciated and too weak to put on a truck," she said.
There are strategies farmers can employ in that situation but Dr Davidson said some were putting off calling the local vet because of the cost.
But some farmers have been hanging onto stock and the RSPCA however is dealing with a lot of calls from the public about animals in poor condition, and calls from farmers wanting help to euthanase cattle and sheep that are too weak to transport.
He said selling now could be a good option for many.
Dr Tom Mullholland addressed farmers in drought-affected areas of New South Wales recently about the mental challenges they were facing.
"If you’re feeling irritable, stressed, depressed — you don’t want to get out of bed, you might have a hardware issue.

Drought conditions persist in Henderson County, despite occasional rain.
On Monday, the county average had risen to 612.
The range was from 502 to 696.
According to Texas AgriLife Extension Service, Henderson County is in a period of moderate drought conditions for the past 90 days.
A standardized precipitation index was developed by the Colorado Climate Center in 1993.
Lake Palestine read 342.98 on Monday after a recent high of 346.87 on March 1.
Herds have been increasing since about 2009, when the last drought began to lose its grip.
The Texas Drought Preparedness Council created a preparedness plan in 1999 that defines four types of drought.
The water deficit results in serious damage and economic loss to plant or animal agriculture.
A socioeconomic drought occurs when water shortages start to affect the health, wellbeing and quality of life of the people, or when the drought starts to affect the supply and demand of an economic product.

Throughout the state, the drought has continued to have adverse effects on farmers and livestock producers.
Many assistance programs have been made available to help them through this difficult season, from opening water resources to an emergency cover crop program.
Every county in Missouri has been affected by dry to exceptionally dry conditions since Aug. 14, and 86 counties are now considered in drought alert.
In response to worsening drought conditions throughout the state, Parson announced the availability of water for family farms at 28 Department of Conservation areas and five Department of Natural Resources state parks last week.
Farmers who want to make arrangements to pump water can contact DNR.
The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service also enacted an emergency cover crop program to assist those who have been affected by the drought last month.
Farmers and livestock producers can apply still apply for the cover crop assistance at local NRCS offices until Friday.
Along with programs aimed at assisting Missouri farmers, DNR has also enacted a program in the hopes of addressing public drinking water systems that have been negatively affected by the drought.
The emergency program provides financial assistance to eligible communities experiencing the loss or potential loss of critical drinking water services or facilities.
Funds are available for the construction, reconstruction, replacement, rehabilitation, temporary repair, temporary connection or improvement necessary to continue or restore operation of a public water system and provide safe drinking water to a system within a state designated drought alert area.

Because they take vast amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, rainforests are an important part of the planet’s carbon cycle and their conservation is playing front and center in major international efforts to combat global warming.
In a study published recently in Nature, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used lidar data captured by satellites to map changes in forest canopy in the Amazon following a particularly severe drought in 2005.
Lidar, which stands for "Light Detection and Ranging" uses lasers to measure distances and create three-dimensional representations of surface features like canyons, craters, and, in this case, trees.
If the drought continues too long, the tree will die.
Big trees also sequester a disproportionate amount of carbon dioxide, so their loss means a forest is not able to store as much carbon as it once did.
And as the big trees decompose, their stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere, tilting a forest’s carbon budget from sink toward source.
Last year, scientists discovered that much of the rain that falls in a rainforest comes from water vapor that trees release through their leaves.
But if a drought makes trees lose their leaves, then this water doesn’t get added back to the atmosphere, making it likelier that another drought will happen.
The study only looked at the years following the 2005 drought, which was so severe that it would normally be a once-in-a-century event.
The researchers write that if this is indeed the new normal for the Amazon rainforest, then the consequences could be dire both for the Amazon and for a world that depends on it to regulate the global climate: "Our results clearly indicate that the Amazon forests may lose their role as a robust sink of atmospheric carbon in the face of repeated severe droughts."

OTSEGO COUNTY — Otsego County was considered part of roughly 5 percent of the state in severe drought, according to the most recent updates in last week’s U.S. Drought Monitor.
Both the moderate and severe drought conditions are atypical for Northern Michigan in a region that may show “abnormally dry” conditions but rarely actual drought compared with the U.S. Drought Monitor’s maps of recent years.
The last time Otsego County experienced drought conditions was in 2010 and it was considered a moderate drought.
The last year Otsego County saw severe drought conditions was in 2007.
He said as of Monday, Gaylord was still about 2 inches below average in rainfall so far this month.
Lutz said Gaylord has basically been dry all summer.
“For the last three months, which is the meteorological summer, we are down a little over 3.5 inches since June,” he said.
“That’s really what we need to break us out of the drought.
Really, to get things to start improving, we need to get several good steady rains that could be an inch plus over the next several weeks.” Prior to the weekend rain, Gaylord was down 4 inches compared to normal average August precipitation.
VIDEO: Michigan’s late August drought conditions through the years at a glance Watch again VIDEO: Michigan’s late August drought conditions through the years at a glance Watch again

Matt Evans, an arborist with Ryan Lawn and Tree, said the age of a tree can determine how a drought will affect it.
The reason is that they’ve stored enough energy, and can draw on reserves to make it through difficult weather patterns.
Another thing to keep in mind is where the tree is planted.
"What I recommend to homeowners is on trees that are five years or less, is one inch of water per week, and I usually like that in one good solid watering," Evans said.
"The exception to that would be a very young tree that’s recently been planted.
We may have to break up that inch of water during a couple time during the week."
Evans said if the area does get one inch of rain during the week, you don’t need to water your tree.
The best seasons to plant trees in the Kansas City area are spring or late fall.
"The last couple of winters have been dry and evergreens will continue to lose moisture through the winter, which makes it really difficult on them if they don’t have an established root system," Evans said.
If you have any questions about proper tree maintenance or need work done, be sure to check with a certified arborist on the matter.