[Tagging] Is crop=yes tag completely and utterly useless?

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 18. Aug 2019, at 14:10, Paul Allen <pla16021 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Land in crop rotation may be left fallow for a year, with no crop.  OTOH,
> where the land is very uneven then it might be used for nothing but pasture
> (sheep or goats are the usual "crop" on land like that).


+1, also where the soil is very meager (?) it may not be worth to plant crops and will be only used for extensive pasture



> 
> Maybe we need crop=rotation rather than crop=yes.  I suspect we need both. 



I’d prefer a new property crop_rotation=yes rather than using the crop key for something that isn’t a crop type.



> Not
> necessarily as the tag crop=yes if everyone thinks there's a better tag, but we need to
> cover "this is used to grow crops in some sort of rotation" and "this is used to grow
> crops but I can't figure out what type from this distance and I don't know if it's
> monoculture or rotation."


+1

By the way, maybe fields used for “organic” agriculture could get another new property as well?



> 
> Or maybe we should restrict ourself to mapping it as farmland because, in general,
> we don't know what a farmer is going to do with a given field from year to year. 


this is what you can always do, and what you should do if you don’t know the specifics, although from a survey (or even from detailed aerial imagery) even a city dweller would usually be able to distinguish at least pasture from crops (if she passes there at the right time).


Cheers Martin