Great Southern beef farmer takes page out of mining industry’s book, installs plastic water catchment lining

Stirling Ranges Beef farmer Paul O’Meehan has taken a page out of the mining industry’s book and given it an agricultural twist, installing plastic water catchment lining to save precious water and thousands of dollars. Faced with dry conditions and drought, WA farmers are forced to think out of the box to conserve water resources collected in their dams. Mr O’Meehan’s recent installation of plastic lining to the water contours that lead to his feedlot dam meant the collection of even the smallest amount of rainfall at Stirling Ranges Beef. The liner was installed in a similar fashion to practices common in the mining industry, and is designed to stop seepage, evaporation, and bacterial presence in water, in the hopes of saving thousands of dollars. Based in Borden in the Great Southern, Stirling Ranges Beef — renamed from Butterfield Beef in 2017 — is a family-owned, premium beef producer operated by the O’Meehans and feedlot manager Brett Page. It produces grass-reared, grain-fed Angus and Angus cross-bred beef with superior marbling, turning around eight to ten thousand head a year, with 2026 expected to be 11,000. The dirt catchment is a standard, clay-lined catchment. Mr O’Meehan said it took around 20mm of rain to fall before the dam captured any moisture, adding after years when those 20mm events were few and far between, they decided they needed to be able to capture lower-rainfall events. “We’re getting more one-to-four-millimetre rainfall events, and our traditional catchments just aren’t capturing it,” he said. Mr O’Meehan said that he has seen the practice of lining with plastic in mining operations, as well as increasingly seeing the Water Corporation lining local catchments in the Great Southern — such as Jerramungup and Ongerup — and decided it would have an effective application in agriculture. “We thought, it’s time to tidy our catchments up anyway and refurbish them, maybe we should invest some money into lining them with plastic,” he said. “That way, we could be capturing every skerrick of water even when it’s a lower rain event, say at 10mm instead of 25mm. We could maybe fill our dam a few times over.” The lining was installed by West Coast Lining Systems, with assistance from Mr O’Meehan and Mr Page. Mr O’Meehan said it involved one-millimetre-thick plastic, welded together and secured around the edges with a half-metre trench. Mr Page, who has been documenting the process of the lining on his X account with photos, said they were already seeing results. “We’re two days out from finishing the project and this morning we had 0.2mm overnight in a little shower and there was already water in the dam,” Mr Page said. Mr Page believes that the water is “cleaner and better”, with reduced sentiment, thanks to the liner. Mr Page said that if the results continue to be good, they will consider extending the use of the lining. “This dam is mainly for feedlot, but we might possibly do the same thing with some spray dams,” he said.