On Friday morning grower David McIntyre packed his walnuts and set out from the tiny Victorian town of Stanley to plead with beer giant Asahi to stop buying the water from beneath him.

The bucolic plains of his walnut plantation are under threat, he told Asahi executives, as water miners hawk the precious lifeblood of the town to sell in plastic bottles.

After a failed Supreme Court bid to protect their water reserves left them tens of thousands in debt, and facing water legislation that’s seemingly impossible to challenge, Stanley's residents personally delivered a petition of 125,000 signatures calling for Asahi to stop bottling the town's water.

Every week, hundreds of thousands of litres of groundwater is pumped from beneath Stanley, a town near Beechworth of less than 400 residents, and trucked away to be bottled and sold under the Cool Ridge label by Asahi Beverages, owner of brands Schweppes, Gatorade and Frantelle.

The community and Indigo Shire Council have been fighting water mining for years, at no small price. Stanley Rural Community Incorporated, representing the locals, was hit with a $90,000 bill for court costs following an unsuccessful, four-year battle to challenge the trucking away of 19 million litres of water a year.