Farms in the game SimCity 3000
I haven't played SimCity 3000 in a while but managed to find a couple of screenshots from one of my cities:
I also found a discussion of how to do farms in SimCity 3000 and they came up with different parameters than I did for solving the farm problem in the game.
The issue with farms in SimCity 3000 is that they only develop on large blocks of land that have been zoned as "low density industrial." There's no "farm" zone.
In practice, what this means is that if pollution rises and/or industrial demand rises, they start converting from farmland to industry. It's challenging to not lose your farms because the minute you have industry anywhere near the farm, the whole thing falls apart because the pollution levels rise too high to stay farmland and now you basically need to rezone and replan because farms can be as much as 9 tiles deep from the nearest road but industry only develops up to 6 tiles away from the road.
The discussion I linked above talks about making 8x8 farms with a road on one side. All my farms are 18x18 with a road down each side to make use of the 9 tiles deep farm allowance and be maximally efficient for space usage.
You basically need to isolate the farms so there's little or no traffic except farm traffic on those roads or you start losing farmland because the pollution is too high.
The discussion I linked above also suggests that you shouldn't provide water pipes for the farms. Farms are more productive if you provide water but water service helps provide infrastructure for low density industry, which makes it more attractive for converting to industry if there is strong industrial demand.
I provide water to my farms but I also create large defacto protected areas surrounded by trees (to keep pollution low), with dedicated roads for the farms and nothing else. And I typically put the Prison business deal in the middle of my primary farming area.
The Prison lowers land value which helps keep it attractive for farms and low density industry. Actual prisons in the US are frequently in the middle of nowhere with little to no development nearby, so this actually reflects real world practices to some degree.
The primary thing you need to do is keep pollution down on farms. The secondary thing you need to do is provide adequate industrial development opportunities elsewhere so people don't convert farmland to industry.
I always enjoyed the challenge of creating farms that would remain farms in SimCity 3000. No, I don't use the option of designating it "historic" in part because it's an aggravating game mechanic that requires you to manually check a box on every tile and with multiple farms at 18x18, that's a LOT of tiles.
It's 324 tiles per farm or nearly a thousand tiles for every three farms. Thanks but no thanks.
But also in the real world farms actually need to be low pollution, low cost, etc. In the real world, you don't want farms growing food next door to a highly polluting factory because you don't really want to eat food soaking up poisons from nearby industry.
The king's stamp doesn't make the gold good. Similarly, simply issuing an edict that "THIS is now farmland forevermore because I said so." wouldn't actually cause good food to grow under the wrong conditions.
If my farms are sufficiently isolated, it's possible to recover them by cutting electricity to them and completely bulldozing the entire farm, then wait for the pollution to clear completely before restoring power. But I also need to make sure I remedy any issues that helped foster the conversion to industry or it's a bottomless pit of throwing good money after bad.
My experience with playing SimCity 3000 is that providing the right conditions for development vastly outweighs any tweaking of taxes or turning laws on or off.
Raising or lowering taxes or changing various laws has relatively minor impact. If you want growth, you absolutely must have adequate power, water and demand.
This seems to be a reasonable facsimile of real world development. Corrupt politicians may be able to bribe or otherwise entice people into doing certain things, but actual healthy development is an organic process.
If you want to foster development, I recommend you focus on problem solving.
Figure out what "ingredients" you currently have and what you can add to that to level up sustainably. That's the concept behind my Development.Recipe tag.