Macedon Ranges Council: permits to convert from grazing to cropping

One of Victoria’s biggest tree-change councils plans to rezone farmers’ land – and force them to gain permission to convert from grazing to cropping.

Daniel McKenna said the push to rezone farm land and impose overlays was a backward step for conservation. PICTURE: ZOE PHILLIPS

Macedon Ranges Council wants to take control of agriculture, with plans to rezone farmers’ land and force them to gain permission to convert from grazing to cropping.

Under the Council’s Draft Rural Land Strategy three regions would be converted from farming to rural conservation zones, where any landholder who had traditionally raised livestock would have to gain a permit to put in a crop.

When asked if a permit would be required, Council planning and environment director Angela Hughes said: “Yes. The Macedon Ranges Planning Scheme recognises animal husbandry and cropping as different uses”.

“Cropping businesses usually require significant infrastructure assessment which may impact on the conservation of environmental and landscape values of the area.

“Under the proposed RCZ, a planning permit application must demonstrate how a proposed farming practice is to enhance the conservation, biodiversity, cultural or rural landscape values of the area.”

Baynton farmer Daniel McKenna’s Baynton, faces more than half his 400ha grazing property being converted into a RCZ, said the council’s policy was like some sort of communist takeover.

“It’s no longer freehold land because council is taking control of what we can do,” Mr McKenna said.

“I have 80 acres (32ha) of good flat country where I could grow lucerne, but now they want me to get a permit.”

If the draft strategy goes ahead the RCZ would encompass the McKenna’s home, sheep-yards, a 40ha woodlot, hay and machinery sheds.

The council has already imposed significant vegetation, fire and landscape overlays on the property.

“I have to get a planning permit to scratch myself,” Mr McKenna said, whether to put a water tank on a hill, extend his house, build new yards or cut down trees in his timber lot.

Mr McKenna said the push to rezone farm land and impose overlays was a backward step for conservation.

“I have neighbours who’ve seen what’s happening to me and have stopped planting natives,” he said. “They’re putting in exotics instead.”

Mr McKenna is proud of his family’s management of the property as open woodland, a landscape he says is similar to that which Burke and Wills first crossed in 1860 and is not at risk of being wiped out in a major bushfire.

“When the (2015 Lancefield) fire went through the Cowbar forest, it stopped at my property because the paddocks where it came out were grazed.”

“Outside my window I have a 300-year-old tree that’s only there because I didn’t let it burn.

“Conservation to townies means locking it up, to landholders it means neglect.”

Public submissions to the council’s draft rural land strategy are due by tomorrow night, although council is unlikely to reject those that are lodged within a few days of the deadline, which has already been extended once.