The U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled a geospatial product called Crop Sequence Boundaries (CSB) that offers public access to national-scale visual crop rotation data for the first time. The new tool was developed by USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) and Economic Research Service (ERS), two of the department’s statistical scientific research agencies.
CSB is a cutting-edge map of agricultural fields that provides crop acreage estimates and historical planting decisions across the contiguous United States. The open-source product uses satellite imagery and other public data to allow users to analyze planted U.S. commodities, enhancing not only agricultural science and research, but providing producers an innovative resource to help make farming decisions.
“CSB gives farmers a chance to look at area farmland and see how remote sensing is capturing planting decisions,” said NASS Administrator Hubert Hamer. “Farmers will be able to use eight years of historical crop rotations to enhance their farm records or look at the management history of land that they might have recently started operating. They can also look at how their planting decisions compare in their regions.”
New farmers or farmers considering renting land could also use CSB to decide which crop to plant based on past rotations, such as corn to soy, and researchers can conduct analyses at the field level, such as studying conservation practices for a particular field. The tool fills a gap between existing data sources, offering a more comprehensive picture and data in one place that is not provided by most other field level products.
CSB incorporates technological advances in satellite imagery and high-performance cloud computing with Google Earth Engine. It is one of several tools that NASS and its partners have developed over the years to support agricultural analyses and to make data more accessible and valuable to the public.
Source: usda.gov
Photo Credit: istock-fotokostic
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