[Talk-GB] What is farmland?

[Mark Goodge]

On 14/12/2019 16:08, Martin Wynne wrote:
>> I would say yes, as I believe both arable & livestock is farmland.
> 
> Thanks Dave.
> 
> But in that case, how on OSM do we differentiate between the two?
> 
> It seems silly that in some areas of OSM we can go into ridiculous 
> detail, such as whether a bench seat has a backrest, but vast tracts of 
> land which visually look very different are classed as one and the same?

That's partly because our mappers tend to be more urban, and urban 
things are what they tend to care more about and have more knowledge 
about. But, also, it's often hard to map rural areas from observation as 
a lot of it is private property that can't easily be accessed other than 
along the route of public rights of way. So we're more reliant on the 
aerial imagery for a lot of the countryside, and in many cases it's 
impossible to tell the difference between arable and grassland as it's 
all just shades of green (or, in summer, brown). In the same way, you 
can't easily see field boundaries on aerial photography unless they're 
separated by something easily visible, such as a hedgerow.

So I don't think this is an easily solvable problem, at least not 
without a lot of groundwork and local knowledge.

Mark