Plans to expand Whitehaven Coal's Vickery mine in north-west NSW have been approved.

Whitehaven Coal wants to increase the total amount of coal extracted at the mine by about 25 per cent, while also expanding its disturbance area by 776 hectares.

The state’s Independent Planning Commission (IPC) has imposed 184 conditions on the project.

“The additional environmental and amenity impacts can be appropriately managed and mitigated,” commissioners said in a statement.

“The project would generate significant social and economic benefits for the local area, North West region, and to NSW.”

Whitehaven Coal CEO Paul Flynn say the project will create up to 450 ongoing jobs, with a direct capital investment of more than $600 million.

Local environmental group People for the Plains has slammed the decision, says farmers must now compete with the mining giant for water.

“Boggabri will now essentially be hemmed in from all sides by large coal mines,” Boggabri farmer Sally Hunter has told the ABC.

“It will no longer be a farming community in any sense, but a coal mining service centre.”

Whitehaven Coal must now draft a water management plan for approval by the Planning Secretary.

Just a day before the approval was announced, the NSW Resources Regulator announced it would take Whitehaven Coal to court over an alleged breach of its mining approval at a separate site in 2019.

The IPC said the prior breaches of planning laws were not relevant to its considerations.

One of the conditions requires the company to protect the Kurrumbede homestead, which was once occupied by the poet Dorothea Mackellar.

The IPC has limited the frequency and intensity of underground blasting in an effort to avoid any structural damage to the historic site.

Whitehaven has also been ordered to arrange an inspection of the homestead by a structural engineer before any blasting operations began.

The Dorothea Mackellar Memorial Society says it accepts the compromise.