[talk-au] Country homesteads?

[stevea]

I don’t know what Oz'll end up doing, but I’ve been mapping landuse=farm, which became landuse=farmland, since 2009.  I’ve also used landuse=farmyard (renders in Carto as a “stronger tan-orange” compared to “faint orange” for farmland), but I initially restricted my use of farmyard to what (in US English) I think of as a “farmyard:”  areas used to store equipment, like irrigation-related, maybe a barn or roof-only that keeps a tractor dry, “tool staging,” maybe dry area or bins to store feed, etc.  It turns out, and I only learned in 2020 to tag inside of a landuse=farmland with landuse=farmyard on a polygon that encloses the “residential” area (not actually tagged landuse=residential, but it might as well be that) for the building=house, or “farm house” where the people who live on this “family farm” sleep at night.  Our wiki [1] told me this, and I myself have added a few landuse=farmyard polygons (with a farmhouse inside) after (recently) learning that this is well-used (and well-documented) tagging.

See, because landuse=residential for the farmhouse would collide with landuse=farmland (which renders?), doing it with farmyard-inside-farmland works to identify the farmhouse (area).  Try it, after seeing the photo in the wiki, it makes sense, and the rendering (more color saturation where the people are) is visually pleasing, if not more semiotically sensible.

Of course, there’s lots of other good tagging senses for “country homesteads" identified in this thread.  Use what works, don’t use what doesn’t.  OSM is nice like that, but it is good to share and discuss, especially on national mail-lists, where a lot of nodding and agreeing happens.  You’ve got “sheep stations” and such, it may very well be that Down Under develops its own (not-too-quirky, but uniquely Strine) methods of tagging “country homesteads.”

Happy mapping.

[1] https://wiki.osm.org/farmyard and see the photo in the “When to use…” section