ABSTRACT
The Swedish Board of Agriculture, among other activities, is responsible for the maintenance and provision of digital and analog map information to Swedish farmers in support of European Union (EU) initiatives. These initiatives provide monetary compensation to farmers based upon central EU agriculture policy. Specifically the provision of paper maps, for purposes of claiming subsidies, is a yearly task that currently creates approximately 130,000 unique maps based on farmer land holdings. This paper describes the process of keeping the supporting geographical data up-to-date and an automated method to create and disseminate all maps according to a strict schedule.

Part of the European Union's (EU) Agricultural Commission agenda has been to create a subsidy program which pays landowners according to various schemes. As an example, a particular scheme might pay landowners a subsidy for growing a particular crop (in addition to the market value of a crop), or, to remove a particular crop, all according to EU central policy. The agricultural schemes can vary from year to year and even differ from country to country but are all, within each country, carried out by the country's own Board of Agriculture. In order to monitor applications somewhat equally at the macro level, the EU made a central decision about five years ago to base subsidy payments according to claimed area (measured in hectares). Further, it was decided that vector digital mapping based on orthophotography, at a scale of 1:10,000, would be required infrastructure within each country in order to seek EU agricultural subsidies.

In the case of Sweden, 1995 was the first year EU subsidy applications were submitted (Sweden joined the Europena Union in 1994). A digital database had not been created at that time to support this activity. Submitted maps were in most cases copies of a 1:10,000 topographic map with hand drawn references to land units for which a landowner was applying for subsidy. When applications were checked for consistency it was found that more than half of them used property code references which could not be strictly verified with the National Property Register (NPR). As well, the NPR only reports total area within a property unit, giving no information regarding land use i.e. amount of forest, water, or arable land. The EU gave Sweden two years to create a digital database which could be used to support adequate subsidy submissions, as well as to carry out checks on these submissions and other policy issues.

The SBA looked at how other European countries had solved this problem and determined that the "block" model was a stable and cost effective method of maintaining an appropriate database. A block, by definition, is a land area unit used for either pasture or cultivation bordered by roads, forested land, water, or other drainage. Additionally, a block is not necessarily owned, or used, by only one landowner.

To save time and money the SBA chose to use the digital version of the national 1:10,000 scale topographic map as the base which to create the block database. Land areas between transportation, water, and other drainage features were isolated, then revised by landowners together with staff from the 21 counties (who provide an administrative support role to the landowners). Orthophotography and the landowner subsidy submission from 1995 were other support materials used to refine the block database. This work together with development of an ArcView application to update the database information was in place by the spring of 1998 and the EU then approved the database as suitable for subsidy and control activities.

Administratively, the SBA is responsible for centrally hosting the database, while the 21 counties are responsible for keeping it up to date. Centrally, the database resides in a Oracle 7.x/SDE 3.02 software environment on a Sun Sparc cluster. The counties access it over an extranet using ArcView clients (up to 50 simultaneously) to update the data.

The SBA also has an additional responsibility to provide maps to all landowners who seek annual subsidies from the EU. There are a number of issues which make the job of creating these maps a very intensive job:

All delivered data were set up in an identical server software environment - Oracle 7.x/SDE 3.02. An ARC/INFO client process was written to read the mapping database and create map files in PostScript format. These files were then sent to a digital printing device. These devices are ideal for this type of job as they produce high quality prints at very fast thoughput speeds. All landowner maps were created, printed, and delivered according to schedule.