Looking to the future of land evaluation and farm planning

Land evaluation has a long history of describing and quantifying the sustainable productive capacity of land. There is a global recognition of the need for this discipline to start recognising the services beyond food production provided by landscapes, as well as the impacts land uses have on receiving environments. An ecosystems approach was used to extend land evaluation to include additional outcomes and was paired with farm system optimisation to explore farm system design. The approach was tested on a sheep and beef farm to explore the added benefits of steep land retirement for flood mitigation and soil conservation and potential trade-offs with farm productivity. The approach showed successfully that it is possible to aim for multiple benefits ranging from increased profit to decreased environmental footprints. Such capability to define and include ecological boundaries within which resources should be managed is a feature that analytical farm system frameworks will require into the future. Keywords: multi-functional land evaluation, ecosystem services, farm system, optimisation