[Tagging] Should pastures be tagged landuse=meadow or landuse=farmland?

[stevea]

No.  This isn't correct, and I've been earnestly interpreting the meanings of these tags for at least a dozen years.

I only use meadow on GRAZED (by livestock like cattle or sheep) areas, which by their nature are grassy.  If they are grassy areas (not somebody's lawn or a patch in a park) I tag landuse=grassland.  This distinction took some years to fully articulate, but has been quite well-established in my mind since the mid-teens (2014-15?) and likely before if others want to scour the tags' history.

I have written many times that landuse=farmland does NOT mean ONLY "row crops."  It can be for many things "agricultural" like beekeeping or other insect raising (ladybugs for beneficial aphid control), maybe mushroom-gathering, though some say these are forest products (and they often are, leading to a weird "treed farmland" reality which is truly extant in the real world) and other activities that agricultural in nature.  However, distinctly, landuse=farmland collides with landuse=forest (forest and farmland ARE distinct, though the nuances remain debated).  We also tag landuse=orchard and landuse=vineyard as specific kinds of agriculture that we might say are "more sharply defined with their own landuse value" distinct from farmland, even though these "are farmland" (semantically), too.

The farmyard value can be used to delineate not only areas around barns, sheds, tool storage (even if outdoor, like large irrigation rigs), garages for tractors (sometimes tagged barn, sometimes tagged garage) when on, around and in a supporting role to a landuse=farmland polygon.  This tag (farmyard) can also be used in a "residential" semantic sense to denote "the farmhouse upon the farmland."

Beyond that, an editor should (must, really) get some of these basic understandings under its belt before it goes and implements wholly different semantics to these tags.

Telling us what editor it is (and maybe link to a repository link so we can grind on its bug reporting there) is helpful; there is no need for anonymity here.

Thanks, Zeke.  I hadn't seen these before.  They do seem problematic, at the very least "not well-vetted before deployment."