A return to the presumption that most cropping and pastoral activities are fun-
damentally unsustainable leads to a consideration of the policies of Landcare,
a favoured Australasian institutional means for providing technical advice to
the rural sector. In this way the cropping, pastoral, plantation forestry and
agro-forestry combinations can be linked with erosion control and ground water
retention while arresting weed infestation and combating fertility decline. Two
complications are: on the one hand misguided official intervention and direction in
agriculture through the application of subsidies, price-controls and tax breaks: on
the other hand ineffective land-use planning and conservancy guidance. This is
changing. What is now coming through is weed and pest control, riparian edge
protection, catchment and groundwater management; and a conservation of the
remnant indigenous forest heritage, regulatory controls and the uptake of best
practice advice. The ultimate remedy for exhausted lands involves the buying-in
of development rights, or the use of ‘transferable development rights’ for acquir-
ing irrevocably decimated rural properties as part of the conservation estate.^33Sustainability. Rain-watered agro-forestry can arrest the ‘mining’
of dessicated and infested rural lands, decrease the salinity of
water tables, enhance soil productivity, and of course produce
some timber.
Plantation forestry on former grasslands reduces the rate of
water run-off and evens out flood flows, and is generally held to
notadversely affect overall stream-water quality. Indeed agro-
forestry and plantation forestry offers hope for continuing the
productiveness of otherwise marginal rural landscapes while also
contributing to the capture of carbon dioxide. The wider intent with pastoralism
and agro-forestry is to avoid the overcropping of lands of declining worth and
utility. This is an issue of national, regional and local importance over the longer
haul, involving the fashioning, over time, of a balanced land-use regime. In these
terms it is a clear planning option to conjoin conservation withdevelopment. There
is, however, a complexity in that the lead time for agro-forestry exceeds the ever-
foreshortening lead time set for attaining planning objectives.
Although a stand-alone rural hectare suffers a scale diseconomy, there are
economies in favour of plantations only 10 ha in extent. In other words small-scale
5 to 25 hectare forestry plantation lots are a profit-taking option for medium as
well as large-scale farmers, and in these terms they are realistically practical for
hobby farmers. By 2050, clear-felled supplies from the world’s remaining indige-
nous forests will either be exhausted or be subject to effective logging bans, yet
the demand for wood-fibre will increase within those Asian growth economies
with landscapes unsuited to, or unavailable for, forestry. The summary view of
profitability, considered in the context of sustainability, is that allowing for a dis-
counting of the cost of capital for plantation ventures, plantation forestry and
agro-forestry involves modest initial outlays, low annual-once-over maintenance,
and eventually impressive wood-fibre production andincome yields associated
with the capture of carbon dioxide produced as a result of fossil fuel consump-
tion. The planning challenge, and a conservation with development planning168 Practice
Maclaren (1993: 51)
holds that ‘The common
belief that pines cause
soil deterioration is not
supported by soil
scientists who have
worked on the topic.
There is, indeed, good
evidence for the
opposite effect.’