NRCS e-Site

From NRCS, part of their new site for farmers.

• Learn how to obtain a SCIMS record and eAuthentication Account to access Conservation Client Gateway

	Request technical assistance or advice for your conservation needs. Access technical information, such as the Web Soil Survey, the National Plants Database, and the National Conservation Practice Standards and Specifications to learn more about soils, plants, and conservation practices.
	Apply for conservation program financial assistance. Manage your applications, contracts, conservation plans and the associated documents through Conservation Client Gateway. Report practice completion and installation, and request information and modifications to your conservation plans and contracts.
	View, sign, and submit documents related to your conservation request. View and track the status of your requests for technical and financial assistance. View aerial maps of your property where you have requested technical or financial assistance.
	View and track the status of your financial assistance conservation program payments for completed conservation practices in your existing contracts.

I'm pleased to see the SCIMS and USDA login--one small step on the path to having a universal government login process. But I do wonder about the back end. Are the conservation plans and practices going to be layers in a USDA GIS.  Will the "aerial maps" of your property be displayed from such a GIS?

Maps Today and Yesteryear

I remember my college history 101 course.  Part of the exercises was taking mimeographed maps and drawing the outlines of the various historical entities (like the boundaries of the Roman empire).

Compare that with today--take for example this Vox set of 40 maps which explain the Middle East.  The Internet and the computer make graphics so much better, and more available than we had 50 years ago.  And that's totally ignoring GIS.

Economists say our productivity is no longer increasing as fast as it once did.  I suspect the problem may be their statistics aren't up to the task of measuring the modern economy. 

UK Versus US: Enclosed Farmland

An interesting piece in Buzzfeed (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution) on Britain's housing problems. But I want to steal one of its 15 graphics:

Note the "enclosed farmland" category, which basically covers most of England and Ulster, plus bits of lowlands Scotland. 

Trying to find the equivalent for the US.  There's this NASS map, which can get very detailed--I'd never seen it before. 

And there's this map of "prime farmland". 

What's important I think is that farmland in the US is much more splotchy; the UK is much more uniformly developed as either farm or urban.

Dueling Aerial Compliance: NRCS and FSA

ASCS/FSA has long used aerial photography to validate acreage reports.  It was a big deal in the 70's when we moved to aerial compliance using 35mm slides matched against the base photography.  Samuel T. Brown, Jr. and his shop got an award because they saved so much energy

Now it seems NRCS is into aerial compliance(for conservation compliance reviews):

Instead of staff taking photographs [as they did in last year's pilot], this year NRCS will contract to use special planes equipped with GPS-synched, high-resolution cameras attached to the belly of the craft.
“We feel this will be much more efficient,” said Adkins. “We went through several teams of volunteers to complete last year’s pilot project. All the banking and tight turning required to get good photographs took a lot of time.”

I wonder if there's been any coordination among the agencies.  Faint hope. (Though I suspect the parameters for NRCS are enough different than FSA to make coordination hard. I am a little concerned about the idea of notifying landowners of the flights--does that set a precedent for FSA, or is what I would guess to be a big different in altitude enough of a distinguishing feature?)

Congratulations to NRCS

NRCS has made their soil survey info available on mobile devices.  What's not clear to me is whether they're using the GPS info available in some such devices to automatically pull up the soil profile you're standing on.  I suspect they aren't, but it's the obvious next step.