Great tool for measuring pasture acreage!
Sept 29, 2014 15:58:03 GMT -5
karenp and carragheendexters like this
Post by zephyrhillsusan on Sept 29, 2014 15:58:03 GMT -5
Our County Extension Agent sent us a very useful link today after visiting with us to talk about pasture improvement. The first thing we need to know is the actual acreage so we can calculate how much lime, fertilizer, etc. we need. The tool is ACME planimeter.
The ACME planimeter comes up showing a map of the entire earth. (It supposedly will find your location based on your internet address, but it didn't work for me.) I just kept zooming in and shifting the map around to keep my target area in the center: North America to southeastern U.S. to Georgia to northwest GA, etc. Once it got close to our farm, I switched to satellite view and got our farm on the screen.
You can see our farm above (I edited out the street name, thus a few blurs). I started calculating acreage on our Back Pasture, which appears at left. First I clicked on the upper left corner of that pasture, then moved my cursor down along the fence line and clicked again. That created the blue line you see. To the right of the map are two buttons, one to remove the last point and one to clear all points, if you make a mistake. I just kept moving my cursor around the edge of the fence line, clicking as often as needed to follow curves, cut out groves of trees, etc. until my red lines joined up with the first spot. It was that easy!
At that point if you look under the map you can see that the area is displayed in square meters, hectares, square kilometers, square feet, acres and square miles.
The easiest way for me to preserve this information was to take a screen shot. I changed the name of each screen shot to reflect the particular pasture. For instance, this one I called "Back Pasture - 4.8 acres" instead of "Screen shot blah-blah-blah" as it appeared on my desktop. I'll save all the screen shots in a folder on my computer, and I can easily check whenever necessary to recall how many acres there are in a particular pasture.
By the way, the copyright may say 2014, but the map is older than that because the L-shaped beige building at the top of our map (left of the red roof) was torn down in December 2013, leaving only the gray carport and the small garage next to it. That's our new sacrifice pasture, although it goes by the nicer name of "Kara's Pasture," the name of our daughter who used to live in that double wide.
This is a super cool tool which you may already know about, but I wanted to share it with you for those who don't. It will work all over the world and can even cross the Date Line, if any of you happen to have a farm that spans it! Have fun plotting your acreage!
The ACME planimeter comes up showing a map of the entire earth. (It supposedly will find your location based on your internet address, but it didn't work for me.) I just kept zooming in and shifting the map around to keep my target area in the center: North America to southeastern U.S. to Georgia to northwest GA, etc. Once it got close to our farm, I switched to satellite view and got our farm on the screen.
You can see our farm above (I edited out the street name, thus a few blurs). I started calculating acreage on our Back Pasture, which appears at left. First I clicked on the upper left corner of that pasture, then moved my cursor down along the fence line and clicked again. That created the blue line you see. To the right of the map are two buttons, one to remove the last point and one to clear all points, if you make a mistake. I just kept moving my cursor around the edge of the fence line, clicking as often as needed to follow curves, cut out groves of trees, etc. until my red lines joined up with the first spot. It was that easy!
At that point if you look under the map you can see that the area is displayed in square meters, hectares, square kilometers, square feet, acres and square miles.The easiest way for me to preserve this information was to take a screen shot. I changed the name of each screen shot to reflect the particular pasture. For instance, this one I called "Back Pasture - 4.8 acres" instead of "Screen shot blah-blah-blah" as it appeared on my desktop. I'll save all the screen shots in a folder on my computer, and I can easily check whenever necessary to recall how many acres there are in a particular pasture.
By the way, the copyright may say 2014, but the map is older than that because the L-shaped beige building at the top of our map (left of the red roof) was torn down in December 2013, leaving only the gray carport and the small garage next to it. That's our new sacrifice pasture, although it goes by the nicer name of "Kara's Pasture," the name of our daughter who used to live in that double wide.
This is a super cool tool which you may already know about, but I wanted to share it with you for those who don't. It will work all over the world and can even cross the Date Line, if any of you happen to have a farm that spans it! Have fun plotting your acreage!
