Abstract
The Department of Agriculture and Food, Western Australia, has worked closely with state and local planners and agricultural practitioners over the last 4 years to develop a new way to identify high quality agricultural land (HQAL). This methodology combines land capability or suitability for horticulture and dry land cropping and grazing with irrigation supplies, rainfall and yield information. It then ranks large tracts of “similar” land according to its versatility for a range of agricultural land uses. This information, developed in a pilot project in the mid west region of Western Australia (WA) has been designed to suit formal land use planning. The HQAL methodology is being extended to other parts of Western Australia (WA) and has value for local planning. To use this information effectively more work is required state-wide and nationally to establish the relative importance of HQAL in many locations, including those near cities and towns.
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van Gool, D., Stuart-Street, A., Tille, P. (2016). High Quality Agricultural Land in Western Australia: A New Decision Tool for Planning. In: Maheshwari, B., Thoradeniya, B., Singh, V.P. (eds) Balanced Urban Development: Options and Strategies for Liveable Cities. Water Science and Technology Library, vol 72. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28112-4_21
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