>>41624
>>41620
Yeah, the thing is around say Brisbane, the actual prime farmland is the Lockyer valley.
Aside from that most of the rural land is either grassland or bush, and there's plantation timber going north. Sure people graze animals nearer to the city but it's not that big a deal, you can do that in a lot of places.
Now it would be silly to have somewhere like Gatton grow massively and swallow up the agricultural land around it, but there's absolutely no reason for that to happen when there's so much room around Ipswich and Logan, it's actually more likely to have small towns grow into commuter towns where you have urban councils being shitheads with land release and where a rural council decides to take advantage and make some money.
In the south of Brisbane for instance there's an enormous triangle of basically nothing Between Ipswich, Logan and Beaudesert.
Most the land between logan and the goldcoast around the highway is nothing, and it's slowly being infilled as is.
Going north to the Sunshine coast it's timber plantations.
You could double the population of greater Brisbane and not significantly encroach on agriculture.
The thing is, actual prime farming regions like along the Murray and New England have pretty specific geography and most of the really good farmland that could be lost to urbanization WAS lost 50 or 100 years ago because those were the regions where the capital cities were founded in the first place.
What's left on the margins is mostly not that important.
Besides that, industrial agriculture in a country like Australia isn't THAT constrained by land, it's more about whether it's economically viable to produce crops and also about the water available.