The Rural Planning Wheel
Preservation of Agricultural Land

Zoning For Agriculture

The issue of recognising the importance of Agricultural land as a growth management constraint has been done by Wollondilly Shire Council and others to varying degrees of completeness. Ian Sinclair of EDGE Land Planning was the Manager of Strategic Planning at Wollondilly Shire Council and was responsible for the innovative agricultural zoning regime implemented by Wollondilly Shire. Wollondilly prepared its Agricultural Lands Study in 1993 which recognised the importance of agricultural land in the Shire and the whole Sydney region. This was followed by the Review of Rural Lands Local Environmental Plan (LEP) and Development Control Plan's for the Agriculture Zone, Agricultural Landscape and Rural Living zones.

There are three basic zones when considering zoning for agriculture. It is important for the zone names to recognise the use and not the character. Rural is a character and agriculture is a use. The three zones are as follows:

1. Agriculture Zone This is the zone, which is used to preserve the best farmland - both for its current use as well as its potential as having high-class agricultural land. It will generally have intensive type uses or if extensive uses, and then it will be high quality land with minimal fragmentation.
2. Mixed Use / Agricultural Landscape Zone. This is the land which is not of high quality, but is of need for extensive type uses and will have a landscape that is hilly and perhaps not the highest quality but does have pockets of high quality land and significant uses.
3. Rural Residential Zone. This is a zone that use be considered when assessing the land as it is a fact of life that rural residential development is desired and it is better to plan for it so that it can be kept away from the agriculture uses to avoid conflict. In such a zone, intensive agriculture should be prohibited. Similarly rural residential uses come in two different forms - Rural Living and Rural Urban Fringe.

The first stage in the preparation of any planning exercise for rural land is to have a detailed understanding of the existing situation. This needs to be done via a detailed study of the area. There are a number of issues to be considered in the area begin studied. Then it is necessary to apply a standardised methodology to the land being studied to identify that land which is suitable for agriculture zoning and that land which should be zoned as a different zone.

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1. Agriculture Zone (Go there now...)
2. Rural Residential (Go there now...)
3. Issues Surrounding Agriculture (Go there now...)
4. Methodology (Go there now...)