Farming representatives have rejected the notion that they are causing more damage than their metro counterparts after recent reporting showed that land clearing authorisations on private rural land across NSW have grown by 500 per cent since 2018.

Approvals for the most controversial Pasture Expansion doubled to over 100,000 hectares in the 15 months since 31 December 2020 despite a warning from the government's own natural resources advisors in 2020 that the practice represented a statewide risk to biodiversity.

According to the Australian National Greenhouse Accounts from 2021, however, land converted to cropland in 2019 was at 2,290 hectares, while land converted to forest grew to 14,562 hectares.



NSW Farmers Vice President Xavier Martin said that the contribution of farms is often left out of the equation when it comes to these issues. 

“With a growing global population comes a growing demand for food, our farmers are balancing protection of the environment with rotations and productivity of the land,” Mr Martin said. 

“The fact is that when you look at this issue as a whole, farmers growing food are not having a major impact on the total amount of vegetation in our state,” he said.

However, Independent NSW MP Justin Field said that the growing amount of land clearing approvals are a ‘ticking time bomb’ for biodiversity. 

“Since 2018 an area more than 2,300 times the size of the Sydney CBD has been approved for land clearing on private rural land across NSW,” Mr Field said. 

“At a time when we know NSW is in an extinction crisis and with the unprecedented fires destroying and damaging huge areas of public and private forests, the NSW Coalition Government has allowed land clearing approvals to explode despite their own experts warning them they represent a significant risk to the state’s biodiversity,” he said. 

His accusation references the 2019 report from the Natural Resources Commission, which warned the government that the relaxed clearing laws represented a risk to biodiversity. 

The report also found that despite the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 stipulating "for each hectare cleared under the framework, it is estimated that between two and four hectares will be set aside and managed in perpetuity”, no Local Land Services region in NSW achieved that bench mark. 

Despite this, Mr Martin said that authorisation numbers under the land management code need to be understood in context. 

“Firstly, only a fraction of authorisations granted are fully carried out, so numbers of hectares granted are in no way synonymous with hectares cleared,” Mr Martin said.

“It is also important to understand which pathway through the code is used. There is no way to ‘clear’ vast amounts of land without prohibitively expensive offsets. This idea of broadscale clearing to convert to cropping land is not possible under the codes. The most common use of the codes is to manage invasive native species, which actually encourages better biodiversity outcomes,” he said. 

Mr Martin said that farmers are working to grow healthy plants and animals while minimising any impact on the environment.