Macedon Ranges residents call it “The Block syndrome”. In 2022, the top-rating Channel 9 renovation series parcelled a 32-hectare (79-acre) historic farm at Gisborne, 55km from central Melbourne, into lots for a “tree change” special. While more than 1.7 million viewers tuned in, to many living in Melbourne’s green wedge it symbolised a crisis of overdevelopment.
“People are sold an illusion,” says fifth-generation farmer Liz Burns, who runs livestock and grows berries, herbs and bush foods in the Hepburn shire council, which neighbours the Macedon Ranges shire, about 100km north-west of Melbourne.
The region holds “some of the best, cleanest, deep red soils with pristine water”, Burns says, but years of development have drained the community “of its energy and resources”.
“Neither the state nor local governments understand just how vital it is to protect what’s left of such quality land,” she says.
“Carving up our farms into lifestyle blocks and tourism simply doesn’t stack up economically.”
Farmland seen as vacant land
Farmers and planning researchers have for decades warned against development encroaching on the fertile farmland within 100km of the city.
A body of research shows the city’s food security and climate resilience rely on its ability to source fresh supply from its immediate surrounds, where much of the state’s richest soil holds the capacity to provide about 82% of the city’s fresh vegetables and all of its eggs and poultry. The urban fringe food bowl produces almost half the vegetables grown in Victoria, according to the Foodprint Melbourne project.
But as lifestyle properties and a growing number of suburban-style housing estates displace farms, this capacity is undermined. Melbourne now has the largest footprint of any Australian city. The market gardens that used to populate the urban fringe are being displaced by vineyards, horse properties, high-end niche produce, tourism and land banking.
Growth corridors with poor infrastructure and often substandard amenities extend into the Mornington Peninsula, Yarra Valley, Werribee, Bacchus Marsh and West Gippsland – all regions with unusually productive soils recognised in state policy.
Farmers are usually paid a premium to sell. For multi-generational businesses, selling to a developer or land banker can be a lucrative succession plan.
A spokesperson for the state government says it is “protecting Melbourne’s green wedges and peri-urban agricultural land, consistent with the metropolitan planning strategy, Plan Melbourne and our Biodiversity 2037 strategy”. But critics say planning decisions taken by successive governments are “causing incalculable harm” to fringe farmland systems.
“There has probably never been a time of more fragmented governmental institutional and policy responses,” write RMIT urban planning professors Michael Buxton and Andrew Butt in their 2020 book, The Future of the Fringe: The Crisis in Peri-Urban Planning. “Peri-urban planning is blighted by a classic policy deficit.”
The loss of farmland has accelerated this century, under both Coalition and Labor state governments, increasing land prices and the cost of farming.
An analysis of land use zoning conducted by the ABC in 2021 found that over a 10-year period, “the amount of farmable land potentially lost to housing developments could be as much as 11,000 hectares – or 63 times the size of Melbourne’s CBD”. Last month, the Mornington Peninsula shire urged the state to implement “urgent change” to zoning to protect the council’s “highly valued green wedge from inappropriate development”. Other councils have varying positions.
The Andrews government promised to introduce planning reform in 2019. In a submission to the reform process, the Victorian Farmers Federation said the government’s “repeated failures to address” farmland loss reflects a “planning system that sees farming land as vacant, waiting for an urban use”.
‘We’re the only orchard left’
To the city’s east lives orchidist Frank Caccaviello, whose Wandin North farm has been in his family since 1967. He says housing, tourist venues and land banking have collectively exiled growers, leaving remaining farmers isolated.
“There used to be all farms here. Now we’re the only orchard left on Hunter Road,” Caccaviello says. “It’s largely vacant land, with horses.”
The fragmentation of farming communities can increase a range of risks for remaining growers. Researchers have found urban sprawl presents greater bushfire dangers and decreases firefighting capability. Decline of remnant grassland and bushland presents other risks, as remnant vegetation benefits farming systems by helping to reduce topsoil loss, control disease and weeds, fix soil nutrients, sequester carbon, provide windbreaks, encourage pollinators and stabilise water tables. Habitat decline is driving wildlife to the remaining farms. Third-generation cattle breeder Suze Houghton says her Yan Yean pasture hosts “loads more roos” since excavators began cutting new housing estates towards Wallan.
Urbanisation has also seen starlings, miners and blackbirds proliferate on Caccaviello’s orchard. “But if we use gas guns or spray to protect our crops, we now get complaints,” he says. “We’ve had complaints about our four-wheeler bikes. We’ve had to change how we farm – it’s all about tourism for this area. Even though the council says it’s here for the farms, it’s just a smokescreen.”
Land-use conflict stories are common: Bellarine Peninsula farmer Noel Vallance was reportedly threatened with legal action after dust from stripping grain settled in a neighbour’s swimming pool; Macedon dairy farmer Peter Grant reportedly said a planned development will curb his ability to milk at 3am.
Buffer zones can be imposed, but conflicts have amassed to such an extent that the VFF is pushing for a policy that “ensures farmers’ right to farm is not eroded by secondary uses, which create land use conflict”.
Making a distinction between essential production and lifestyle farming could be one policy reform, says VFF branch spokesperson Lisa Brassington, who has a background in regional planning and food systems. Such a policy could discern between “nutritional [beneficial] and non-nutritional [non-beneficial] farming systems”.
“It’s not enough just to protect farmland,” says Dr Rachel Carey, lead researcher of the University of Melbourne’s Foodprint Melbourne project. “It’s important to incentivise landholders to grow perishable products – fresh fruit and vegetables – close to Melbourne, particularly with the shocks and stresses on our food systems.
“Cities are significant sources of waste that can be turned into fertilisers on farms. We’re using a small fraction of available wastewater to produce food: in the context of climate warming and drying, it makes sense to retain areas of fertile farmland close to the city and to water treatment plants. This is strategically important and should be central to policy thinking.”
Land use policy needs “certainty for farmers and developers”, says Carey. “We need stronger signals that the urban growth boundary won’t be expanded. These must be first and foremost farming zones, and the state government must dampen down speculative investment [land banking]. A range of policies, with clear roles delineated for each level of government, would secure the viability of food production.”
Government food procurement standards – for example, sourcing food grown on the urban fringe for hospitals, prisons and schools – are used in North America, Carey says. Other policy responses could include incentives, infrastructure support, market instruments, diversification of food systems and differential farm rates that reduce costs of produce farming on the fringe.
Another policy solution is to respond to the growing demand for new housing by urban intensification rather than releasing new greenfield sites. Victoria is considering removing councils from planning processes in an attempt to increase the density of existing suburbs.
The Victorian government has not yet set a release date for the green wedge reform policy.
Meanwhile, farmers on the fringe face uncertainty when considering investing in new sheds, land and modernisation. That makes succession unlikely, says Caccaviello.
“It’s really hard for us,” he says. “Family farms are dying. We’re the next to go.”
Katherine Wilson is a writer and freelance journalist from the Yarra Ranges in Victoria
