soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

Brian Roberts, DDIAE
1989
Farm planning has been a substantial part of rural advisory
services in many developed countries since the mid-1940s. In
Australia several states including Queensland, have inherited
the British planning system based on land capability and land
classes. This system which has much in common with the North
American approach, has relied heavily on the mapping of
physical resources and attributes, as the basis of farm
planning.
Over time it became clear that many farm plans were not used
as a basis for on-going improvement of management - in fact
the farm plan was often no more than a prized picture on the
property office wall. This paper aims to analyse the reasons
why farm plans have been so ineffective in expanding sound
land management, and what changes are required as we enter the
era of group property planning.
The O ld Way
In the past, individuals applied to state departments to have
their farms planned. Farm planners and soil conservationists
drew up topographic maps, plotted hydrological patterns,
surveyed soils, mapped vegetation types and identified the
boundaries of land suitable for cultivation.
Seldom did the physical plan form a basis for management and
economic decision-making. In many cases, the fact that the
farm plan was only a resource inventory, was not made
sufficiently clear and as a result, evidence now shows that
the standard of management is little different on planned and
unplanned farms. In practice it is found that the winners of ,
conservation competitions and the financially more successful
farmers +ave seldom had their farms planned. In addition, a
- recent-survey by the Soil Conservation Service of New South
Wales -shows that of a sample of 2000 landholders whose farms
had been planned by SCS over the past two decades, only a
small proportion actually used their plan to any extent in
their management and development.
C
These findings on the non-use of detailed physical plans
should not be interpreted as indicating that planning is
unnecessary, but rather it should encourage a re-thinking of
why and how the planning process has been approached and
whether changes are indicated.
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