Cate Faehrmann, a Greens member of the New South Wales legislative council, will move a private member’s bill next week to give councils more power to regulate blueberry and other berry farms which are expanding throughout the mid-north coast, leading to serious frictions with other landholders.
Separately, the state Labor government is considering an inquiry into alleged worker abuse in the region. Most states regulate labour hire companies, which serve as intermediaries between farmers and seasonal workers, but NSW does not.
Guardian Australia has reported on allegations of underpayment, poor living conditions and exploitation, particularly of workers who arrived on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (Palm) scheme but left their employers, often allegedly as a result of worker exploitation.
Faehrmann’s bill aims to address the environmental impacts of intensive berry farming.
“People move into these beautiful valleys for the lifestyle and the environment but then wake up one day and within months they are looking at an industrial-scale blueberry farm,” she said.
“It beggars belief that you can erect hectares of poles [and] white netting without telling your neighbours or getting council approval, but people have to apply to put up a carport.”
Faehrmann said there was a “deliberate massive carve-out” for the berry industry from planning laws that was “unfathomable”. She called on Labor to fix the problems, which she attributed to previous National party influence on policy.
Faehrmann’s bill will call for mandated buffers between intensive horticulture farms and homes and waterways, as well as strict controls on spraying, runoff and irrigation and greater monitoring of produce for pesticides.
She also wants to see councils given greater powers to regulate blueberry farms after the Coffs Harbour council lost in the NSW land and environment court last week.
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The council had brought a case against two raspberry farmers at Bonville who had challenged a stop-work order that the council had imposed on their raspberry farm.
The council said polytunnels under construction required development approval. The tunnels – constructed with metal tubing and hoops to create tunnels 2.5 metres high and up to 60 metres long – were farm buildings within their local environment plan (LEP) and required approval. The tunnels covered 4 hectares.
The farmers said they were part of “intensive horticulture” which does not require a development application under the Coffs Harbour LEP.
The court upheld the farmers’ case, agreeing that these were not farm buildings, because they could be disassembled and stored when not in use.
“The legal prerequisites for the order do not exist,” the court said. “The appropriate course, if there were an ambition to require polytunnels and the like to be subject to development consent, would have been to make intensive plant agriculture a use permissible subject to development consent.”
Locals are concerned that runoff from blueberry farms could affect the environment. Photograph: Zahn Pithers
The chief executive of Berries Australia, Rachel Mackenzie, told Guardian Australia in October that the proposal for DAs was not supported by the planning department or the state government, and that “validates the industry’s position”.
At Scotts Head, people are concerned about the proximity of new blueberry farms to waterways and South Beach national park. Blueberry farming is rapidly expanding beyond Coffs Harbour, where it began several decades ago, into the Nambucca Valley and the Kempsey area to the south, and west toward Grafton and Bellingen.
“I have been in the area for a while and it’s just devastating when blueberry farms arrive,” Zahn Pithers, a local photographer said.
“It devalues the land because no one wants to live next to a blueberry farm – except another blueberry farm.
“We are losing farming families who have been here for generations. The blueberry investors come in and just lowball them because they know there aren’t any other buyers once there is a blueberry farm next door.”
Pithers is particularly concerned about the proximity of a very large blueberry farm next to Warrell Creek and the South Beach national park and the beach.
“People from Nambucca fish here and eat crabs out of the creek. Where does the spray drift go? What’s happening with the runoff? This farm is built on sand,” he said.
Pithers has asked the EPA to investigate but there are no results as yet. Previous monitoring in the Nambucca Valley by the EPA detected three different pesticides in low levels in three creeks, suggesting water quality in the area was not being impacted by excessive amounts of pesticides.
In November 2024, Nambucca Valley council asked the NSW planning department to include a requirement for blueberry farms to seek development approval as part of its LEP. The planning department rejected the requirement, saying it was not supported by sufficient evidence.
A blueberry farm near Warrell Creek and Gaagal Wanggaan (South Beach) national park on the NSW mid north coast. Photograph: Zahn Pithers
The council is now working on a second proposal for the planning department, but is struggling to agree on whether issues like buffer zones should be left to self-regulation rather than mandated.
The state minister for planning, Paul Scully, said it was open to councils to seek changes to their LEPs so they could require horticulture providers to seek development approval.
The current standard LEP, developed by the state government, says that intensive agriculture in RU1 primary production and RU4 primary production small lots zones must be permitted without a development approval. However, councils can choose to regulate the RU2 rural landscape zone.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach but requiring mandatory development applications across all rural zones would hinder efforts to reduce regulatory burdens and support modern farming practices across NSW,” Scully said.
“Overly restrictive local planning controls may delay or prevent necessary farm upgrades, deter investment, and create uncertainty for landholders looking to modernise their operations.”
