For all the talk on the need to preserve farmland, it seems to be almost worthless.
Most of our farmland has been turned into small lots, there are only a handful of lots over 100 acres in this region. If the proposal were to have gone ahead, this land would have been lost as land available for purchase for farming.
For a farm to be viable in this region as a farm you need to have about 200 acres as a starting point. You also have to own the land so that you can get the financing needed to pay for all your infrastructure. irrigation systems, tractors, cold storage, seeds etc are all not free.
As an example, to plant 30 acres of grapes you would have to spend about $300,000 and then another $100,000 in equipment. You would not see return for four years. 30 acres of grapes in this region will bring in about $90,000 a year.
What we need is for councils to adopt a policy of land consolidation for ALR land. We also need to see more properties on the market as agricultural land and not as estates.
In the case of Sandown, something seems odd here. There is a lot of profit left on the table by the owners even if they had taken on all the liability they wanted to pass onto to the municipality. I have to wonder if someone knows something about the property they are not telling people.
The land is not going to sell quickly because of the unquantified land remediation risks on the land