Abstract

Locating Livestock Farms with an ArcGIS Feature Extraction Extension
Track: Agriculture
Authors: Justine Allpress, Maggie O'Neil, Mark Bruhn

Precise livestock locations are desired by epidemiologists modeling livestock infectious disease outbreak response strategies. As part of MIDAS (Models of Infectious Disease Study) research RTI International used US Census of Agriculture cattle farm counts, USDA Common Land Units (CLUs) as farm parcel proxies, nationwide GIS datasets, and agricultural buildings identified with feature extraction software, Feature Analyst, to identify the likely cattle farm locations within the data-poor county of Franklin County, Texas. The likely locations were then visually verified with aerial imagery, and the numbers of verified cattle farms were confirmed against agricultural census county totals. RTI also located swine farms in North Carolina and attempted to estimate associated farm attributes of interest to the researchers: animal capacity and production type. Sample swine farm locations including these attributes and recent aerial imagery were used as input to Feature Analyst to identify and attribute different swine farms across North Carolina.