[Talk-GB] What is farmland?

[Tony OSM]

I have always thought that farmland as an English word means land used 
for production by growing things - cabbages, cows etc. Hierarchy then 
led to arable, pasture, horticulture. But what do you do with managed 
woodland eg coppiced or pollarded or left to semi-wild animal 
populations eg deer, swine?

Fields also have a habit of having several uses determined by a farmer  
- pasture/grass for silage, arable/grazing stubble. These also change 
over time.

Climate has a highly important role in determining what farming is 
carried out - west side of England is predominantly pasture, east side 
of England predominantly arable. Wales and Scotland also have altitude 
to modify farming practice

Can we agree a hierarchy and notation method to this deceptively simple 
question and then update the wiki.

Tony

TonyS999

On 16/12/2019 10:21, Philip Barnes wrote:
> On Monday, 16 December 2019, David Groom wrote:
>> ------ Original Message ------
>> From: "Dave F via Talk-GB" <talk-gb at openstreetmap.org>
>> To: talk-gb at openstreetmap.org
>> Sent: 14/12/2019 15:54:13
>> Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] What is farmland?
>>
>>> On 14/12/2019 15:19, Martin Wynne wrote:
>>>> Is this "farmland"?
>>>>
>>>>   http://85a.uk/haws_hill_960x600.jpg
>>> I would say yes, as I believe both arable & livestock is farmland.
>>>
>>> I concur with your frustration about 'huge multi polygons', especially when joined to other features such as roads & rivers. I believe a few mappers were keen to fill in the gaps rather than map accurately. Personally I think there should be one polygon per field, but I admit that makes for a lot more work.
>>>
>> I see no benefit to mapping individual fields as separate polygons
>> tagged as farmland if adjacent fields are also farmland. Could you
>> explain why you think this is best?
>>
>> David
>>
> Large polygons make future editing very difficult.
>
> It is very beneficial to differentiate between arable, pasture and hopefully we can get real meadow back from the misuse it has received.
>
> Farming use changes, mapping individual fields allows farmland types or other changes to be maintained far easier than if it is part of a huge polygon.
>
> All in all it goes to make for a better more usable map.
>
> Phil (trigpoint)