[OSM-talk] Tagging schema for farms

[Matt Williams]

Hello all,

I've got to the point in my local area [1] where most of the roads etc. are 
mapped and now I'd like to start fleshing out the local countryside. Now, 
since a huge amount of the countyside is farmland I've been lookin into how 
to best tag it. However, currently we are somewhat lacking a decent set of 
tags. There's pretty much only landuse=farm being used at the moment and even 
then it seems to be used differently by different people (some use it to mark 
the farm houses, some the surrounding area, some to mark the extent of the 
fields etc. [7]).

Recently, there has been a number of proposals for new ways to tag farms 
[2,3,4] but none of them seem to have been able to reach a consensus since 
they all focus on a small part of the picture.

What I'd like to do is get the feel for what people want from a farm tagging 
scheme from this list and then put together a decent, coherent proposal to 
get this sorted out - once and for all. Now, the way I see it, we need to be 
able to tag the following:

a) Farm house area (this seems to be what landuse=farm is really designed for)
b) Farm buildings (this is covered by the building= tag now. Hence [4] is 
redundant)
c) Individual fields with:
c 1) Field types. That is animal or crop. See [2] for discussions so far.
c 2) Animal type or crop type
d) Field boundaries. These are very useful for walkers but are only easily 
mapped with good aerial imagery. This has been mentioned by many people [5] 
but nothing seems to have come of it as yet [6].

Personally, I think that (d) is the most important to sort out. It should be a 
linear way and not an area. My current thoughts are to use landuse=farm for 
(a) and boundary=fence or boundary=field for (b). As for the (c)s, perhaps a 
landuse= or an agriculture= tag? What do people think?

Regards,
Matt Williams

[1] http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=50.9112&lon=-1.0053&zoom=13&layers=B0FT
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/Crop
[3] 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/agricultural_Field
[4] 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/Farmyards,_farm_buildings
[5] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2007-January/010105.html
[6] http://etricceline.de/osm/united-kingdom/en_stats_boundary.htm
[7] http://etricceline.de/osm/united-kingdom/en_combination_landuse=farm.htm
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