Department Assessment Criteria for Agricultural Necessity

In deciding whether or not such land improvement is reasonably necessary for the purposes of agriculture or amounts to a separate land use activity in its own right the Department will take the following considerations into account: • whether the amount of material brought onto the site is the minimum required to achieve the needed improvement; and • the nature of the material being deposited; and • the extent, scale and duration of the operations involved; and • the quality of the agricultural land being filled; and • whether the landowner is a farmer actively engaged in farming operations on the holding.