—Brian Vanderbilt, USDA-FSA-APFO
Displaying and analyzing changes and trends in agriculture over time is becoming a more important topic of conversation from the aspects of agricultural production, increasing urban footprints, changes in farming practices, and general planning activities. Detecting change of agriculture over time requires historical data, such as imagery, or potentially vector based historical information. The USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) Aerial Photography Field Office (APFO) has a massive archive of historical imagery reaching back to the 1950's. This paper will focus on what can be done and what cannot be done, using automated, semi-automated, and manual processes, in comparing multiple years of imagery (black and white, natural color, color-infrared, and multi-spectral) to detect agricultural change.