Integrating Parcels Into Farm Records Management Larry Cutforth WLIA Conference 2/23/04

Outline FSA digital farm field boundaries and imagery programs Role of parcels in farm field records management. Future directions

USDA Farm Service Agency Responsible for Federal farm programs: Price support Farm disaster relief Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) Farm loan 56 county offices, 400 employees in WI.

Farm Service Agency Records Federal agency responsible for managing farm field boundaries and attributes. Set farm, tract, and field numbers used by other agencies.

FSA Past Farm Record System Hand-drawn boundaries and annotations

Acreage Measurement Digitizer- Planimeter

Farm Record Changes Producers inform FSA of ownership and land cover changes. FSA offices check deeds and other documentation to confirm ownership and acreage. Concerned with cropland acreage. Non-cropland ownership boundaries not carefully documented.

Land Records Modernization: Digitizing Common Land Unit (CLU) Farm Field Boundaries

Modernization of Land Records Started conversion to GIS June 2003 Digitizing complete for all WI counties by June 2005 Migrating to ArcGIS in 2005

CLU Farm Field Digitizing WI has highest average number of farm fields per county in the US.

CLU Certification Before the CLU may be used for USDA programs, it must be certified. Process: Clean up spatial and tabular errors Mail maps to each farm land owner and operator to check location field boundaries. Use GIS acres for FSA programs.

Challenges Steep learning curve for staff Conservation Reserve Program – revising most contracts to match GIS calculated acreage. Constant maintenance

Users of Common Land Unit Data Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) County Land Conservation Departments Crop insurance Assessors Farm Owner and operators

Data Access Setting data sharing agreement with land conservation departments for full CLU access. General public – all attributes stripped except acreage. CRP information – subject to privacy act restrictions.

FSA Imagery Replaced 35 mm. slides with digital imagery in 2003 Statewide coverage Leaf-on to check crop cover 2003 – 2 m. res., unrectified imagery 2004 – NAIP and 1 m. res., unrectified imagery program Price $30-$50 per county

NAIP – National Agriculture Imagery Program 2 m. res. Orthos collected for 34 WI counties in ‘04 UTM projection, MrSid format Plan statewide 1 m. NAIP in ’05. ’05 NAIP partners – WDNR, DATCP, 12 counties 2 m. NAIP 1 m. NAIP Source: UW- Madison ERSC

Using Parcels for Drawing Farm Field Boundaries: A No-brainer Easy to use – deeds difficult and time consuming to interpret Highly accurate land records base Up-to-date Do not need to reinvent the wheel

Parcel Caveat Emptor “The map provides a representation of the geometry and topology of tax parcels. It is not intended to be used for the legal determination of land ownership or to be in any way a substitute for the land ownership and interest descriptions contained in individual deeds.” - Dane Co parcel metadata

Challenges of Using Parcels Accessibility – Deal with each county Parcel update lags Different boundary definition than ours in some situations. New workflow needed for digitizing.

County Web Mapping Availability

Portage, Dane, and Clark Discrepancies between aerial photo maps and parcels noted on 70% of parcels. -Most right-of-way differences -Using parcels tripled clean-up work on CLU.

Using Parcels to Capture Ownership Changes Land sold off without informing FSA. FSA is informed of an estimated 40% of land ownership changes

Using Parcels to Capture Ownership Changes Parcel crosses CRP field

Using Parcels to Capture Ownership Changes Person who signed up for CRP does not own this parcel.

Dealing with Small Boundary Differences Boundary Discrepancies

Parcels as Reference Layer Valuable reference for checking location of farm field boundaries. Iterative process to clean-up records over time.

Parcel Wish List Easier coordination to obtain parcels Access to owner names and addresses Web service access Create a system where FSA receives a flag that a parcel change has occurred.

Summary FSA seeks data sharing agreements with counties to obtain parcels. Need to coordinate farm records with county agencies more. Duplication of effort is wasting scarce resources. Parcels have been an invaluable reference for FSA farm field maintenance. Thank you for sharing this valuable data.

Thank You! Larry Cutforth FSA GIS Coordinator (608) Ext 139