It’s the time of year when I’m churning out a lot of reports covering the year’s farming activities. As I was looking through our manure management reports I realized that it’s not likely that anyone reads these things cover to cover. We’ve put a pile of information in there and it can make for some [...]
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. — Dwight D. Eisenhower Today we honor those who have fallen in wars. May we have peace and growth rather than [...]
I have a Facebook account and a Twitter account, but I don’t use them very much. It’s one of those areas where I just don’t get it. If you are interested in using social media tools for agriculture, Harvesting the Benefits of Facebook and Twitter is worth reading.
We use a Garmin GPSmap 76 to mark soil sample points. Unfortunately, this GPS does not allow for direct uploading of shapefiles. A shapefile on the GPS can be useful for finding fields or areas of fields. These workaround convert shapefiles to tracks for upload to the GPS. The DNRGarmin tool can read shapefiles and [...]
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’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 [...]
