field2farm: Field to Farm Aggregation

In agriculture, effective decision-making requires an understanding of farm boundaries, yet most farmlands are divided into multiple smaller fields. Farm-level planning and resource allocation often rely on aggregating these fields into cohesive farm units. However, accurately delineating farm boundaries is challenging due to high costs, privacy concerns, and complex land ownership structures. Traditional methods that use satellite data to map these boundaries are often resource-intensive and unreliable for large-scale applications. Additionally, the lack of standardized Common Land Unit (CLU) data complicates the process for stakeholders needing accurate farm-level insights.

The Fields to Farms methodology uses publicly available data from the USDA’s Cropland Data Layer (CDL) to efficiently aggregate fields into farm units. This methodology involves two main steps:

1. Field Delineation – Using external tools, CDL raster data is converted into vector polygons representing individual fields within a county.

2. Farm Aggregation – Our code iteratively combines these fields into farms based on criteria such as proximity, size, and distribution, aiming to match farm size categories reported in the 2017 NASS Census. The process continues until aggregated farms meet the predefined size thresholds, providing an accurate representation of farm structure within each county.

The output is a GeoDataFrame containing classified farms, which can be saved as GeoPackage files for easy visualization and further analysis.

Key Advantages

- Cost-Effective and Accessible: Leverages publicly available CDL data, avoiding the expenses and privacy concerns associated with other methods.

- Accurate Farm Representation: Uses NASS census thresholds to align farm size categories with real-world data, ensuring reliability.

- Efficient and Scalable: Streamlines farm aggregation at the county level, making it suitable for large-scale agricultural analysis and planning.

- Enhanced Visualization: GeoPackage files enable stakeholders to visualize farm distributions across counties, facilitating informed decision-making.

Market Applications

- Agricultural Planning: Assists government agencies and policy developers in planning and resource allocation based on accurate farm sizes and distributions.

- Land Use Management: Supports land management organizations in understanding and optimizing land use for sustainable practices.

- Agribusiness and Crop Management: Provides agribusinesses with reliable data for crop planning, resource allocation, and precision agriculture.

- Research and Development: Empowers researchers with structured farm-level data, enabling more targeted studies in agricultural efficiency and sustainability.

The Fields to Farms methodology provides a practical, accessible solution for generating farm-level data from field boundaries, filling a critical data gap in the agriculture industry. By using readily available CDL data and aligning it with NASS census standards, this tool offers a streamlined approach to farm aggregation, enhancing data accuracy and accessibility for agricultural stakeholders.

This software is open source and available at no cost. Download now by visiting the product's GitHub page.