I’m after some opinions (from the UK community) regarding the use and re-tagging of UK fields, as either landuse=farmland or landuse=meadow + meadow=pasture.
The use of the tags is fairly well established.
landuse=farmland is for land where crops are grown
landuse=meadow + meadow=pasture is for land used for grazing and also includes use for silage.
I don’t like those tags. For me Farmland should also include pasture. I also consider meadow=pasture is an oxymoron. But the usage of the tags is established, and I can easily live with it.
There are in practice sigfnicant problems with actual use of the tags. If you look at an OSM map that show these tags, you’ll see that there is simply not a consistent approach to mapping agricultural land in the UK. With the primary issue being that many simply tag all agricultural land as landuse=farmland.
In specific area / regions the mapping of agricultural land can be dominated by one person. If that person only uses landuse=farmland for all agricultural land, while the neighbouring area uses landuse=farmland or meadow , then it stands out and misleads.
Should we encourage people to use the two seperate tags, simply retag, or find another solution
I’m strongly in favour of this usage. For walking maps, it is very useful to know whether a footpath is over agricultural meadow (delightful!), pasture (depends), tillage field (rarely enjoyable).
I agree that 95% of meadow is pasture, but it is helpful to identify agricultural meadows (managed for hay/silage) and wet_meadow for boggy areas of rough pasture.
If anything I feel we need better distinction of pasture type; “improved” pasture (in by) vs. “rough pasture” (out by).
not so rarely, depending on the context, these may also change from field to meadow and vice versa. As meadow quite clearly does not include fields, but farmland does include meadows, the pattern you have observed seems consistent.
What? There a huge number of fields in the UK that are meadow.
The term field is for open spaces, or enclosed open spaces. I think it only really excludes woodland. In fact, near me in Dartmoor there are fields which are meadow, but are part of Dartmoor Forest
Although this isn’t what the wiki says, I think landuse=farmland should encompass both fields use for crops and fields used for livestock grazing. To me the common usage of “farmland” covers both, and I also think it’s useful to have a generic tag that covers both uses in one. With crop rotation the usage the change from one to the other, and it’s also not always clear if mapping from aerial imagery what the usage is.
(Indeed, after mapping for over 15 years, I only noticed a few months ago what the wiki said about landuse=farmland - so I’ve been using it for both crop and grazing fields for most of that time. I did a bit of digging to see when/how the wiki page stared saying landuse=farmland is only supposed to be for cropped land. It seems that the page explicitly mentioned “tillage and pasture” until a November 2018 edit, when it was changed to just “tillage” with the understated comment “Update and minor corrections”. I’m not sure if the change was discussed anywhere.)
Yeah, I’ve been wondering how to tag it when a field is used in alternate years for growing potatoes and for grazing cows. Changing the tags every year from farmland to meadow clearly isn’t the solution I did look at the Wiki when I last asked myself this, so I just didn’t tag it
So true. Rotation is no exception, it is the rule, and it includes years of nitrogen catching grasses, and may include grazing.
In Nederland, we have a public data source for actual field usage, but there is simply too much changing all the time. We can not keep up manually, and large scale automated data entry is virtually impossible without destroying actually surveyed data and without checking each and every imported field.
Crop rotation is a bit of a red herring. There is a clear difference between fields that are regularly tilled / ploughed, and upland pasture that is never ploughed. I agree that this might not be clear for an individual field from aerial imagery, but the differentiation between meadow and “farmland” makes for a very intuitive understanding of the landscape in well-mapped areas such as Northumberland.
I always thought landuse=farmland was supposed to include crops and cattle.
In North East England I used animal=yes and crop=yes a little bit, back when nothing like that was done (famrland=* feels better). A key indicator against rotation can be lots of gaps in the hedge mean it hasn’t been used for animal for a while.
Just please don’t do large areas that cover multiple fields/roads. It serves no purpose other than “painting the background” and discourages someone adding individual fields.
I did look at the Wiki when I last asked myself this, so I just didn’t tag it