Data Management
December 4, 2017
The USDA Soil Conservation Service, now Natural Resources Conservation Service, has been charged with creating the country’s soil survey. This survey was designed for broad land use planning. My career was spent mapping soils across the country and that...
Data Management
October 16, 2017
Why spend the time and resources to extract the NRCS ‘Soil SURvey GeOgraphic’ (SSURGO) soil polygons only to display the vector lines as a reference? There is a massive amount of soil information within the SSURGO database, however most...
Data Management
August 15, 2017
Agronomic professionals and technicians dealing with precision farming must understand the soils within the field before writing effective prescriptions. A field provided with the same fertility, same amount of water, and same seed will still have production variability due...
Data Management
June 13, 2017
Many precision farming websites have integrated the USDA NRCS soil survey database using the USDA Soil Data Access web portal. Precision farming websites use the USDA soils database as a foundation for understanding the types of soils found within...
Digital Farming
March 16, 2017
A farming magazine recently published an article of an interview of two experts discussing how understanding the topography of a field can assist farmers in understanding soils. The first paragraph began with the sentences:
"For decades, NRCS soil maps...