The Proceedings from the National Conference on Mitigating Air Emissions from Animal Feeding Operations are online. There’s some interesting stuff here but nothing too earth-shattering. Most of the current odor-reduction methods are covered here, so if you want an in-depth look at any particular odor reduction strategy for your manure storage, this is a good [...]
The Livestock Manure and Mortalities Management Regulation has been amended again this year. I haven’t seen a version that merges the new changes into the existing regulations for easier reading, but from flipping back and forth between the documents, it appears that the biggest change for our clients will be that all operations will be [...]
I read a story in the India Times discussing how more and more farmers are reliant on off-farm income. It’s interesting to see how this is the case throughout the world – it was easy to find similar articles for Canada, Australia, and Europe. Some of this is doubtless due to farmers having to wear [...]
I often want to exclude areas when drawing field shapefiles. These might be undamaged areas in crop damage claims, marshes or clumps of trees in taking field measurements, or other areas that need to be excluded in area calculations. Doing this was pretty tricky until I found the DonutShop 2.0 script for ArcView. How to [...]
We used a GPS to outline a marsh in a field but found that a few of the points were way off. I spoke with Art Dalton of Prairie Geomatics this morning, and he offered the following tips for better accuracy with a Garmin GPSMap 76 (and probably most other GPSes): Give the GPS time [...]
I don’t know of too many operations that still do winter spreading, but it looks as though winter spreading of manure will be going away soon. The current estimate is that all winter spreading of manure regardless of the size of the operation will be banned by 2013. This isn’t a surprise as it’s in [...]
I’m going out to Alberta for the next week and a half, so I probably won’t be updating this blog till I come back. In the mean time, let me recommend Country Guide West for keeping up on agriculture news in western Canada. I have no affiliation with them, I just enjoy their articles. If [...]
1. Save Current track (N/A if you’ve just started up the GPS) a. Press the Menu button twice b. Choose tracks c. Choose save (if Save is grayed out, go to step 2) d. Save entire log e. Choose OK for the default name f. Choose Clear, Yes 2. Set the track to record to [...]
The next set of MLI Data that I find tremendously useful is the MLI Digital Imagery. These are orthophotos of most of the province. An orthophoto or orthophotograph is an aerial photograph geometrically corrected (“orthorectified”) such that the scale is uniform: the photo has the same lack of distortion as a map. Unlike an uncorrected [...]
