US County using GIS for soil valuation

29 January 2010

St. Charles, IL, US: In an effort to ensure their compliance with North Dakota’s state-mandated agricultural assessment standards, Emmons County, North Dakota (in the US), has selected Sidwell Company to provide professional GIS services to aid its assessment officials in the task of calculating soils valuations for agricultural tax parcels. Sidwell will also provide a GPS unit that will be used for the purposes of locating points in their GIS and mapping county infrastructure, such as bridges, culverts, etc.

The company will provide the jurisdiction with agricultural parcel file development services by creating a digital GIS parcel file for all of the county’s agricultural parcels, to be used in conjunction with the soils map layer, to support soils computations using the Farmland Assessment and Report Management System (FARMS)—an ArcGIS-compliant software solution for agricultural tax assessments. The firm will further enhance Emmons County’s GIS data in the urban areas by adding annotation such as lot and block numbers and subdivision names to the GIS files.

One distinctive advantage of this ArcGIS-compliant software solution for agricultural tax assessment is the ease with which the generated data can be exported to various formats for the purposes of complete system integration. Additional features of the software module include being able to set up user-defined tolerances for easily identifying discrepancies between assessed and measured acreages, the ability to then normalise these acreage discrepancies and the capabilities to create customised thematic maps for presentation, set spot symbol placements and record related comments for each parcel.

In addition, Sidwell will provide Emmons County with on-site, specialised training that focuses on the use of the FARMS software extension within ArcGIS 9.3, covering basic operations for processing agricultural parcels, all processing tools and reporting features of the system and the different user customisations that are available within the reporting application.

Source : http://www.sidwellco.com/