How land-use planning in multifunctional regions shapes spaces for farming

In multifunctional rural regions, strong commercial incentives exist for agricultural landholders to convert their land from farming to residential, lifestyle, and tourist land uses. In Australia, those regions mainly comprise coastal, peri-urban, and high-amenity rural areas. The pace and pattern of land-use conversion in these regions is shaped by the interaction of landholders with land-use planning regulations, notably minimum lot size (MLS) controls. This paper examines that interface in a deep dive into the role of land-use planning controls in shaping the future of farming in an area of rapid rural change, the Ballina-Lismore region in northern New South Wales. We argue that although planning controls in the region are designed to protect land for agriculture by curbing pressures for suburbanisation, they have also inadvertently contributed to the proliferation of unplanned rural living. This proliferation has occurred because MLS controls have incentivised agricultural landholders to sidestep restrictions on subdivision by exploiting concessions and flexibility in some of the controls and have forced some nonagricultural buyers of rural land to acquire bigger holdings than they may have otherwise desired, hence “sterilising” these agricultural-zoned landholdings from farming. We conclude that to better protect agriculture in multifunctional rural regions, land-use planning needs to look beyond deterrence mechanisms, such as MLS restrictions, and towards planning incentives to promote farming on agricultural-zoned land.