these braids are not necessarily linked. But for the wider community the three
come together as benefits for the economy, conservation of the resource base, and
as an enhancement of the overall regional environment.
Profitability. The historically narrow and always significant context of profitability
comes down to the managed competency of agricultural, forestry or agro-forestry
production from a combination of tree-cropping and pastoralism horticulture, and
over the intermediate term, to the sequestration of carbon dioxide. Few cropping
and pastoral activities are ecologically sustainable, simply because intensive agri-
culture is not part of nature. Beyond this obvious truth it can be deduced that the
more economically successful a conventional profit-seeking farmer is, the more
removed that farmer’s position from sustainable rural land-use practice is likely
to be!
This is the general situation, alleviated at the city fringe through commercial
opportunities to engage in vegetable, fruit, nursery and greenhouse sales. The
urban foodbasket emphasis is a notable feature of French sustainable food pro-
duction policies, resulting in a knock-on reduction of foodstuff haulage and
storage. The usual pattern in the edge city situation is conventional urban sprawl;
a best outcome is rural retention of all the ‘good’ to ‘excellent’ soils for fresh-food
supply to the adjoining city.
There are several obstacles to agriculture, obstacles co-
associated with problems of commercial viability. Resistance to
change on the farmer’s part can be identified, which has to be bal-
anced against the awkward position of agriculturalists and pas-
toralists as price-takers rather than price-makers, leaving them
out-of-pocket in good and bad seasons alike. Truth underscores
the adage ‘that it is impossible for farmers to go-for-green if they
are always in-the-red’. Consequently, out in the rural heartland,
there resides a ‘right to farm’ ethos, interpreted by landowners as
a freedom of unbridled choice to either farm or do anything else
which occurs to them as a survival option. There are three worst-
case practices: the nutritional wear-down and exhaustion of
‘mined and dessicated’ soils; the creation of tracts of salinated
surface soil as a consequence of raised water (tube-well) irriga-
tion; and the hyper-enrichment of waterways resulting from
excess applications of nitrogen fertilizer up to the margin of farm
profit.^31
In the general, extensive case, an unsustainable and un-aesthetic utilization of
rural lands amounts to widespread non-point pollution. This line of reasoning has
little meaning or impact for cash-strapped farmer-freeholders unless they either
back an alternative tourism-type activity on their own account, or sell on their
‘rights to develop’ to a larger land consortium or a state or local government agency
which is prepared to use the land less intensively. The point and purpose of such
intervention is to maintain open-area land-use viability. The purchase of develop-
ment rights (PDR) procedure is contentious – although the cycle from patterns of
private misuse to public intervention is the reward of the patient and long lived.^32
Growth Pattern Management 167Pinus radiatain the New
World context is a fast-
growing, largely disease-
free and genetically
adapted and improved
species which has the
currently assessed
potential to produce
(NZ context) a $60,000
(2002 value) crop after
25 years for each
hectare of managed
plantation forestry. Agro-
forestry (also known as
farm-forestry) implicates
conjoint farming and
forestry practice on an
inter-cropping basis.