Jan Fallding
Self Employed, Hunter Valley NSW
Based in the Hunter Valley of NSW, Jan consults mainly to councils and state government agencies in regional NSW. She loves to delve into demographic and social indicator data to draw out and explain the gems that will help organisations make informed planning decisions. Her planning interests are a diverse mix: strategic planning in regional areas, demographic analysis, healthy built environments and floodplain management. Her three decades of experience also contribute to her peer review and pro bono work.
Graeme Hill 
The Spatial Lab
A Geographic Information Systems expert with over 24 years’ experience, mostly in the field of urban and strategic planning, Graeme’s experience includes mapping, spatial analysis, and property constraints related to strategic plans and NSW planning instruments and policies.
Graeme has also developed many solutions that simplify business processes or improve data-driven decisions, including mobile field work applications, dashboards and spatial models like walkability or site suitability.
After working alongside planners for many years in local and state government roles, Graeme is now a Director of The Spatial Lab which he cofounded in 2022 with Stephen Barr a surveyor and Registered Planner.
Pigs in Parkes: Visualising key agricultural data for planners with AgTrack
Pigs in Parkes, irrigation in Inverell and agricultural workers in Albury: what do these have in common? They are all aspects of the new NSW Department of Primary Industries (Agriculture) ‘AgTrack’ Dashboard: www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/agriculture/lup/agriculture-data-for-planning/dashboard
Developed for DPI by Graeme Hill with the assistance of Jan Fallding, the Dashboard’s purpose is to make it easier for NSW councils, planners and agricultural professionals to access and understand data relating to agriculture. Its goal is to ‘do things differently’ by providing a much-needed resource for making informed decisions about agricultural land in NSW, at the local and regional level.
Agriculture and agrifood are recognised as key or engine industries in all regions across NSW, and this is likely replicated across Australia. Agriculture contributes employment and income, and forms a primary share of regional land use. However it has been difficult to consider in local, regional and state strategic planning due to the disparate data sources needed to quantify it.
Jan and Graeme will take you through the Dashboard’s features. It uses information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Agricultural Census and Population Census, and the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences’ catchment scale land use data, and presents it at the state, regional and LGA scale in a format that is both friendly and interactive. It shows the importance of local agricultural production and value in a regional and state context. Agricultural land use is included to help provide the local level story and agricultural employment data is shown for sometimes surprising industries.
The presentation will also discuss why this data is needed to produce well informed agricultural, rural land use, housing, employment, economic and regional strategies; and how AgTrack makes this so much easier to achieve.
