Proposal:Crop

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Crop
Proposal status: Abandoned (inactive)
Proposed by: *
Tagging: landuse=cropland or tillage
Statistics:

Rendered as: patterned

More specific than landuse=farm (which could refer to cattle fields)

  • Would this be the same as a field? Cimm 2006.11.22
  • No, because you might be able to walk across a field or you might not. You can't walk across a crop field. You can walk across a cattle field. Crop fields are various colours on satellite photos, cattle fields are green on aerial photos. Cattle fields might have restrictions due to the latest veterinary health crisis, crop fields won't. Cattle fields have fences, crop fields don't. Lumping crop fields and cattle fields together in one tag isn't useful because they're not similar at all. Ojw 11:50, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
  • I didn't create this page so I can only assume what is intended, but a field is the area in wich crops grow, or animals are kept. (or is set aside). So this proposal is less broad. I think landuse=crop is to vague though. Also clearly marking the borders of the field and then streams down the side, and everything else you can think of, leaves no choice but to create fields using segments that have already been used for other ways, and it becomes very hard to get them all going in the same direction. If 3 join at the same point, the segments point in different directions. I make the field borders, with border=hedge (for example), but I think the field itself, just needs to be tagged for its use, not just that it's a field. So landuse=livestock, or something (again preferably less vague). The majority of fields are used in the same way over and over again, as still visible ridges and furrows make clear. Multiple usage fields may need to be possible though, such as hay/sheep. I seek better suggestions, but one idea I thought of was to just stick a node in each field saying the landuse, and then the renderer can fill the area in which it sits. border=none would need to be used as an invisible way of dividing fields if there is gaps instead of gates, or just no hedges at all. Ben. 04:13 23 December 2006 (UTC)
  • I am squarely against this proposal. There is already landuse=farm (although I would have preferred landuse=agricultural) which denotes these areas. the farm description states that on its area livestock is kept and fruits etc are grown. so it includes 'crop' areas. We don't want to get too specific as long as we don't create agricultural atlases... --spaetz 22:40, 25 March 2007 (BST)
  • I'm against this proposal, because farmers rotate their crops; some years they'd use it for barley, some years it's for potatoes, then pasture, so describing the individual crops is an ever-moving target, and we've got better things to do with our time than catalog each farmer's crop-rotation patterns. Welshie 09:16, 26 March 2007 (BST)
  • Well this proposal seems to be landuse=crop, therefore 4 year cycles, wouldn't really be a problem with it. Alternating between lifestock and crop is very rare (in britain at least), although I see your point. The lack of variation in some fields is really clear from the ridges and furrows. If I take every single field in the parish I'm in, none of the fields have changed use in my lifetime, (between lifestock or arable), although may switch corns, or types of lifestock. They do have cycles though, and have setaside years and years where the normal crop is replaced for a nitrogen repleneshing crop. I assume that is common worldwide with modern farming and/or any large scale farming.Ben. 04:55, 30 March 2007 (BST)

  • I think for crops there is a few differnet possibilies of a route to take.
1) - We just take landuse=farm as it's already there, but I think this is a poor tag, as I said in the farm building page.
2) - We have landuse=agriculture instead of landuse=farm and nothing else.
3) - We have the tag being proposed on this page wich is just landuse=crop, and use landuse=farm or agriculture for other spots...which seems a bit incomplete. As also proposed at the top using landuse=farm to mean cattle fields seems wrong, and I disagree with that for quite a few reasons.
4) - We just tag landuse=arable|livestock|agriculture|whatever but leave it at that due to them changing too much (agriculture would be used for when people are not sure of which)
5) - Same as above but one step further, we split fields up into groups and also have Corns|oilseeds|Poultry|Cattle|whatever
6) - Same as above but one step further, we have exact uses for where people are certain its constant. (wheat|rape|maize|tomatoes|whatever)
7) - Same as above, but use crop=whatever to tag the fields use on a 4 year cycle, or even decade+ basis, rather than have to update data on a annual basis.
8) - Asuming the 4 year cycle isn't 3 years corns 1 year setaside or something, we have a way of adding all posibly values to a field. So crop=wheat; barley; potatoes; rape for example. Tagging anything within the last x(?) years. This would involve having multple values under 1 key though.
  • Personally I'm for having any level of detail as long as data can be maintained. Going for the lower numbers in that list would mean that some mappers would be limited, while going for higher would still mean people who aren't interested are fine, but people are not limited. I don't think the argument of what 1 person can be bothered to do, or even wants to do, should ever be raised. It's about allowing people to map things using tags that fit neatly into the tagging system.
  • I still have the concerns I said about a while ago in the post up top. I think data like this really requires more than what osm currently has. Trying to add this data as areas rather than just nodes into a database that would, asuming you get down to adding field use, already be crammed with data, is quite hard. I think I would wait till a future date when this problem is solved, by what ever means, until bothering to use this/these tags myself. Ben. 04:55, 30 March 2007 (BST)

landuse farm should only be use for the "core-area" of a farm. e.g. the area with the farm-house, the barn, greenhouses, stables,... often surrounded by fences. To tag every field where cows or sheep are browsing would be insane and would debilitate the meanings the tag could give. For instance 60% of the non-urban area in Germany is in a agricultural use. Tagging this all as farm can't seriously be the way  ;). So I totally agree, that we need additional landuse-Tags for the rest. e.g. "landuse=field" and "landuse=cropland" or "landuse=tillage" and "landuse=pasture" --Cbm 05:19, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

also see:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/agricultural_Field https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Talk:Map_Features#Landuse_Farm

Key Value Element Comment Example
landuse pasture node area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasture (Other languages) Landuse-farm.png
landuse tillage node area arable land with is in use as cropland Landuse-farm.png


landuse=orchard?

Can crop be reused for orchard somehow? Ojw 20:33, 7 May 2007 (BST)


Comments

  • this proposal is vague and ill-defined and appears to overlap significantly with other features. Unsigned comment added by User:Myfanwy on 2008-01-04
    • this is not true. farm, field/pasture and cropland/tillage are not overlaping, but complement each other --Cbm 15:26, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
      • Then perhaps an agriculture tag is needed. Since such a vastly huge amount of the earth's surface is agricultural, I think it deserves special attention. --Milliams 16:15, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
      • This discussion fits well to the landuse=vineyard discussion. Since each area on the planet has its own way and culture to grow food, the landuse tag might deserve some protection at this point. A combination of landuse=agriculture and produce=xyz seems to make sense for my understanding. Each long term product (vine, olive...) should get an own value, fields with changing usage should get a generic value or even no produce tag at all. --ThomasKlosa 01:49, 6 January 2008 (UTC)


I'm using Yahoo! imagery to indicate where forests, lakes and fields are. Having to tag the fields as farm does seem a bit odd to me as well. I saw there is also a preset of greenfield in Potlatch. Would that be the correct tag for the fields? I would like to be able to differentiate between crop (pretty general, can't see whether it's maize or potatoes on the aerial photography) and animal's pasture. For the animals it seems interesting to be able to say which animals are there. Usually pastures for cattle have barbed wire, horses have these white more visible 'wire' or wooden boards. Sheep have a more closed wire. This is pretty constant. Can't see it from the Yahoo! imagery either, but I would tag it in the field if the tags existed. Polyglot 17:03, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

IANAF but is it not common to rotate the type of crops that are growing on a field. This can be as frequently as one a year (or more?). I feel that tagging the crop type is putting information into the database that will be changing far too frequently. However, differentiating between a pasture (for animal grazing) and a tillage could make sense. --Milliams 17:17, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
First of all I think tagging fields is important in general. Of course we have to face that the outlines of the fields will add very significantly to the amount of data stored in OSM. Judging from satellite images, it will in nearly all cases be possible to identify fields (in contast to wood, water and citys), but I can imagine situations when you see it is a field, but can't´even know if it is used for cattle (or animals in general) or crop. There are crops that look green as grass from above. In other situations it may be very clear to see what grows there: Yellow fields are Rapeseed (at least here in germany), or you know the kind of animals living there. If this is such information, of course you won't know what will be planted there in future, but this is a general problem with maps, all things may change. It may depend on the farmer if he rotates crops often, less often or never.
My personal conclusion: We should be able to tag fields very fine-grained, but also allow for rather general tagging. We already have landuse=farm. I agree with the following (found here): landuse farm should only be use for the "core-area" of a farm. e.g. the area with the farm-house, the barn, greenhouses, stables,... often surrounded by fences.
For the fields, we need other tags:
  • Very general tag landuse=field with an optional(!) animal OR crop tag:
    • animal=cow / sheep / chicken / camel / ...
    • crop=wheat / rapeseed / ...
    • maybe animal=yes or crop=yes if you don't know the type
    • maybe animal=unused or crop=unused if the field was not used for several years
Or, as a alternative to the above
  • landuse=pasture / landuse=tillage (do we still use animal and crop here? If we did, we have redundant information)
Or
  • agriculture=pasture / agriculture=tillage (same problem as above, and I prefer landuse over agriculture if used like this, because it introduces no new key)
I'm not shure if animal and crop are appropriate names for the tags, but I think you get the meaning. pasture, agriculture and tillage are difficult to spell and remember for non-native english speakes, compared to crop and animal.
--Brian Schimmel 18:06, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
This looks good in my opinion. I like the ability to very generally, tag an area as a field without having to worry about what it is used for. Being able to specify more accurately makes sense too but it's more the base landuse=field tag I'm interested in (however, having said that, When I've actually used maps (OS) for hiking/walking, it's the field boundaries which have been most useful; do we have a tag for these?). --Milliams 14:12, 6 January 2008 (UTC)