Web application I-FARM with GIS tool

I-FARM (http://i-farmtools.org) is a free web-based simulation model for farmers and decision makers. It evaluates changes in farm management in terms of environmental and economic effects. Result pages include product mass balances, inputs (seed, fertilizers, livestock feeds and manures), required labor and fuels, expected soil erosion, soil carbon sequestration, nutrient balances, subsidies, and farm income. Important program inputs are soil type and hill slope per field, and weather station location. To accommodate the program user a GIS-application has been added to I-FARM. The GIS application has layers that include roads, streams, railroads, elevation data (30 m raster DEM), imagery (ESRI on-line), soil databases (ISPAID and SSURGO), and weather station and ethanol plant locations.  The GIS-module has been designed as a Microsoft .NET application (program language C#) that displays the maps through ArcGIS 9.2 Server technology. The user identifies farm fields by drawing polygons. The program then looks-up the dominant soil type and closest weather station location and calculates the average hill slope and field aspect, and field area. These field attributes are written in a SQL Server database table. Then I-FARM, which has been developed in another language (ASP VBScript), reads the field attributes from the SQL database and uses them in the simulations. CLIGEN 100-year generated weather data have been incorporated for all 2,500 US weather stations. I-FARM applied the USDA-NRCS SSURGO soil database, which is organized by county. SSURGO data are currently available in I-FARM for 38 states. Spatially explicit SSURGO shape-files have been converted into raster-files to accommodate calculations, currently for 4 states (Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont).

Ed van Ouwerkerk
Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering
Iowa State University
phone 515-294-9127
I-FARM http://i-farmtools.org/i-farm