Yes we are a big country but only a small percentage of that land consists of highly productive soils at most 10 per cent and the majority of those soils are located along the coast – the same place where everyone wants to live.
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That means we are faced with a choice between having food bowls close by major population centres or seeing our prime agricultural farmlands being lost under ever expanding suburbia.
Joni Mitchell’s 1970 ballad ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ contained the lyrics ‘That you don't know what you've got 'Till it's gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot’
Well that is the choice now facing our planners and politicians – protect farmlands or see them disappear under bricks and mortar a type of suburban parking lot.
And it doesn’t always have to be housing, it can be infrastructure, like the proposal to build a heavy vehicle bypass of Singleton that will put bitumen across some of the town’s, if not the country’s ,most productive farmlands – land that has 10 metres of soil.
In the Upper Hunter it may be less farm versus houses and more coal mining impacting on the agricultural sector a similar problem posed by the plans for an open cut mine on the Liverpool Plains – once again a region with some of the most productive soils in the country.
“We have got a real problem protecting our best farmland because 80 per cent of our population is located 100kms from the coast, the same location as our most productive farmlands, and the more our population grows the more pressure there will be to consume that land for housing,” said Ian Sinclair, a town planner who has spent decades working for local and state governments.
Mr Sinclair is currently undertaking a PhD on ‘Contested Landscape –Managing the Tensions between Land Use Planning in Strategic Agricultural Region on Australia’s Eastern Seaboard’ at the University of Sydney.
He is not only concerned with the need to protect farmland but also the great need to ensure our major cities have quick and easy access to food sources such as those on Sydney’s western fringes.
“The peri-urban market gardens in Sydney produce 50 per cent of the city’s perishable vegetables they are vital for that population and need immediate protection from housing development,” he said.
“These crops thrive in western Sydney and have a ready market. That is not the same in western NSW where market access, water and climate all prevent the success we already have on the urban fringes.
“In dollars terms agricultural production in that region is worth annually between $800m-$1billion”
Likewise the farming areas around Maitland and along the coast at Taree, Wingham, Kempsey and Coffs Harbour.
At Coffs Harbour there are battles over the increase in blueberry plantings.
“That area producers 80 per cent of Australia’s blueberries and producers want to expand but there are clashes with neighbouring residents living on lifestyle blocks,” he said.
“The clash between residential areas including the lifestyle blocks is a real and growing problem whether that involves odour from manure fertilisers, noise from irrigation pumps or spray drift. In every case the current planning law,s based on a loss of amenity, make it difficult for farmers to carry out their normal day to day operations.”
Mr Sinclair described the laws that allow newcomers to complain about existing farming operations as farcical.
“These people like to live next door to farms with their views over fields but if a tractor starts at dawn wow watch them send off complaints to the local council who must act,” he said.
He added people in urban areas forget where their food comes from and have no empathy for farmers and that flows through to the political sphere.
We also have an attitude, well entrenched in Australia, that there is plenty of land where agriculture can exist and that is simply not true.
Mr Sinclair said developers win out in the battle between farming and housing a situation he wants changed.
The statistics on population growth should dictate such a change.
Protective measures need to be multifaceted according to Mr Sinclair and include not only buffers, but incentives to farm, significant land rate reductions for farmers and market based bio-banking for farmland.
“The first thing we have to do is to identify the prime agricultural lands in the country,” he said.
“This land must then be protected from any development and one option to assist in this would be the use of bio-banking credits. These credits could be sold by the farmers to developers who are then able to increase the density of their housing projects in an urban area.”
“Its all about protecting prime lands like they have in Canada’s Vancouver Agricultural Land Reserves (AGL),”.
The ALRs, established nearly 40 years ago, cover 4.6 million hectares and were designed to permanently protect valuable agricultural land that has among the most fertile soil in Canada.
Also on his wish list is the elimination of nuisance complaints provided farmers are following best practice – learn to live with the farmers not vice-a-versa.
Plus he wants urban consumers to become more educated about food production saying if you eat you are therefore a partner in farming.
Farmers markets, farm trails agr-tourism are all good ways to connect farmers with their customers.
Mr Sinclair reckons its not rocket science to protect and nurture farming it just requires political will and councils taking a greater interest in the value of agricultural lands through eliminating conflict and providing incentives to farmers.