| dc.description |
Oregon is the number one producer of cool-season grass seed in the United
States. The center of the grass seed industry of Oregon is located in the Willamette
Valley, where about 470,000 acres of seed are grown. Innovative grass seed growers
of the area are beginning to implement precision agriculture GIS and GPS
technologies on their farms. Fertilizer and chemical companies provide precision
agriculture consulting services, including soil nutrient and yield spatial field mapping,
for growers. To help growers learn how to work with their spatial field data, a set of
GIS lessons were created using ESRI’s ArcGIS 9.0. The lessons teach growers how to
use GIS for managing, analyzing, and interpreting their site-specific field information.
They were introduced to interested grass seed growers through a series of three
workshop meetings in January and February 2005. During the meetings, participants
completed evaluations to indicate their knowledge and skill of GIS and GPS before
and after each meeting. From the evaluations, growers indicated they were interested
in using GIS for investigating correlations between yield and soil nutrients and for
creating prescription application maps. Therefore methods for investigating
correlations and creating prescription maps were devised using both Microsoft Excel
and ArcGIS 9.0. Finally, a specific task-based comparison of four different precision
agriculture GIS software packages to ArcGIS 9.0 was completed to provide interested
growers with information needed when evaluating software options available to them. |
|