Members from the yacht club assured him the water levels would increase during winter.

“We ended up putting about 300 metres of gravel down and then the lake dried up, it never dried up in the life of Eppalock before” he said.

He then commenced his own research into Australia’s environment.

Mr Long was also raised on an irrigation farm in northern Victoria where he learned first hand the importance of weather systems, climatology and their integral relationship with the land.

He started to notice specific trends and correlations between weather patterns and other natural factors such as sunspot cycles, sea surface temperatures and lunar phases.

His predictions for future weather patterns are based on data available from The Bureau of Meteorology and other international climate and environmental researchers.

Mr Long said future weather patterns will create a “colder, drier and less-productive climate” that threatens the livelihood of farmers.

“All my work tells me that the driest time in Australia’s farming history is approaching over the next four to five years,” he said.

“The input to farming these days is so great in the cost of sprays, diesel and everything they have to do to make a crop grow, it uses up about two thirds of their profit.”

He believes in the coming years lunar, planet and solar forces will be at their lowest in history which will lead to an environmental crisis for farmers by the year 2021.

“If there’s a lot of cold water around Australia there will be very little rain.”

“Sea surface temperatures are very critical to rainfall and predominantly governed by El Niño and La Niña conditions. Sea ice levels and cold water in the Bight are the deadliest to our rain systems in Australia.”

“When these cycles build together and several of them work together, that’s when you get extreme conditions.”

It’s these conditions that have the potential to cause a blight on the livelihood of Australian farmers.

Mr Long believes that once farmers have a crop failure it becomes increasingly difficult to recover, making it financially problematic to produce a crop for the following year.

“Once they have a debt, they then have an interest figure and the interest figure consumes their profit,” he said.

“If they have two or three failures in a row, they’re gone.”

Crop failures can be caused by a multitude of factors which include frost damage, dry conditions, extreme wet conditions and weed resistance.

One method that Mr Long recommends to prevent the waste of highly valuable water is to build more reservoirs and dams to capture the overflow, to be used by farmers rather than being wasted as it goes downstream.

“It will absorb the big rain events so it [rain] doesn’t have to be flushed down the river as waste flow, damaging the farmers who are in the low lying areas who have got no real protection against it, they just have to take it, they have to wear it.”

“The sort of flood that came through in 2010 could never be held off the flood plains, because it can’t get down the river, there’s too much of it."

Reg Collins, 87, has been a farmer all his life first stepping onto a tractor when he was 12-years-old, he has experienced the ebbs and flows of the farming life and understands the threat of drought.

“In the next seven years I think we’re going to have trouble.”

“There’s not much we can do about it, we just keep trying and if we only get a fluke rain and that gives us good income, it doesn’t take much, it’s if it comes at the right time.”

“Australia has some very dry areas...it can be very disastrous dry... whereas up along the coast where they can get 3 feet of rain... it just won’t come inland for us.”

Mr Collins said the current lack of government subsidies for Australian farmers is a critical issue, whereas in other countries there are many readily available.

“We’re on our own that way.”

“Our job is a really big gamble, we gamble with a lot of money and then we have to spend a fair bit to gamble to get a lot more back,” he said.