Seems like there is no any guideline regarding strawberry fields and stalls next to them.
Let me create some kind of “proposal” here to document at least my current understanding.
Background:
What I’m mostly talking about are so called “Erdbeeren selber pflücken” in German, typically those are organized cultivated fields with strawberries (sometimes also raspberries, currant, cherries, blueberries etc) owned by some company. They’re open seasonally. Usually there are opening hours and there is a kiosk next to a field where the employee is sitting and allow the entrance to the field. There are two options: either go to the field with the empty container and pick the berries yourself, then on exit weight the container and pay-by-weight. Another option is to buy already picked berries or jam, marmelade which are sold at the kiosk directly (with different price, of course).
Sometimes such strawberry-kiosks might stand separated, then there is no field nearby, but only option to buy what’s there.
For the reference, past existing discussions are those (though they were discussing a lot whether those needs to be mapped at all, honestly, I’m not asking about this - this can be mapped as it’s useful for some users, so it’s out of the question. Question is how to map).
2015 Erdbeerverkaufsstände
2015 Spargel- und Erdbeer-Büdchen
2010 Erdbeerbuden
I think what was more or less suggested option is that kiosks are mapped as nodes/areas with shop=farm+seasonal=* (I personally would put “summer”, but one might be more specific). If self-picking on the field or self-service in the kiosk is available, then add self_service=yes.
What’s not really clear (at least, for me) is how I put “strawberries” exactly (so one could search for those). So far I see following options:
produce=strawberry - 69 usages worldwide - I think it would be my preferred way to map those.
produce=berries (116 usages worldwide) + berries=strawberry - 21 usages worldwide - this feels for me like too much tags, why would berries be special from apples and cherries which are dedicated values for produce?
fruit=* marked as deprecated, so not even mentioning this.
The fields themselves seem to be mapped as areas-only with landuse=orchard+trees=strawberry_plants (just 13 usages in taginfo, however this I’d deduct from existing “raspberry” and “blueberry_plants” options for trees) + crop=strawberry (not sure I personally like adding both crop and trees, as I don’t see any difference, but I’m fine with having both)
I think there is no really need to add anything more to the field itself, what do you think? All the operator/names/websites/phones/opening hours can go to the kiosk node. If the field allows self-picking, then adding self_service=yes to the kiosk should do the trick, and still nothing to add for the field itself.
Great question. There are many “u-pick” strawberry and other berry fields here in California as well; I’ve been curious how to tag them.
Both produce=strawberries and produce=berries seem reasonable to me. The former would be for a farm that primarily grows strawberries, while the latter would be for a farm that grows a variety of berries. Maybe someone was concerned that a data consumer would need to know that a strawberry is a kind of berry? But hardly anyone has felt the need to tag produce=citruscitrus=orange, produce=graingrain=rice, or produce=vegetablesvegetables=asparagus;tomato, so I don’t see why we need to use iterative refinement here.[1]
I don’t have an opinion on whether the values should be singular or plural. Ideally it would be consistent, but the whole key is a mess.
I’ve never heard anyone refer to a strawberry plant as a tree. The varieties I’m familiar with are ground cover plants, barely large enough to be called shrubs.
Scientifically, a strawberry isn’t a berry and a tomato isn’t a vegetable… ↩︎
I just have some fields around Munich which have all of cherries, currants, strawberries (maybe also apples, but not sure here). And even some existing tags were using produce=strawberry;cherry;raspberry which seems perfectly fine for me. So given relatively low usage of berries and berries=*, I’d just stick to produce as the low-effort and simple one.
That’s right, physically they’re quite low and small, however I was just following the description of orchard:
trees=* - To specify the trees, shrubs, or other plants which comprise the orchard or plantation. This is the **most common second level tag and should be the first choice**.
The trees page itself has blackberry/raspberry, blueberry_plants… And blueberry for me is even smaller than strawberry…
Also there is mention of crop, I’m fine if we say that we should use it instead of trees in this case, but then I’d fix the description in Wiki, because now it does sound very uncertain, especially this “some mappers” thingy:
Used by some mappers to describe the orchard’s output from a farming perspective.
the place where strawberries are grown shouldn’t be tagged as orchard, it is not an orchard, an orchard implies trees but strawberries are not. I would use landuse=farmland instead of orchard
I think I don’t agree with that (or agree only partially). Here are my thoughts:
First of all, if we are talking about big industrial fields which have no other people interest (but rather employees of this farm/agriculture), I wouldn’t care at all, it can be all farmland and it doesn’t really matter much, because people are not allowed/shouldn’t be there anyway.
However it’s about particular piece of land which has strawberry (and it might have raspberries, blackberry, blueberry, blackcurrant, redcurrant. Not mixed together, but probably close enough that the separation of those would be some micro-mapping for an enthusiastic mapper) and assumes people access, like self-picking. Just yesterday I was on a strawberry field which was surrounded by “normal” farm fields. And for me those represent very different type of land usages. I do want to see the difference, because this field with strawberries and redcurrant in the back is a point of interest for many people and even have dedicated parking, while the fields around are… just fields without general public interest.
Even the current OSM wiki page for trees (which is the main tag for orchard) mention e.g. blueberry plants, and those are also not trees, together with raspberries/blackberries/currants.
StreetComplete also relies on orchard to ask about details what kind of orchard is that and “strawberry” is one of the top options (see New quest: Detail what landuse=orchard produces · Issue #368 · streetcomplete/StreetComplete · GitHub). BTW interesting note that while they started with trees and crop tags, the final version puts this value to produce which leaves me confused… wasn’t produce supposed to be for kind of things which you can buy e.g. at the stall, kiosk, farm etc?
Maybe not representative enough for OSM, but one can google “orchard strawberries” and you do get exactly what expected, the general public does use “orchard” here.
And the English Wiki definition of “orchard” also mentions it might be berries: " may emphasize berry shrubs in preference to fruit trees"
While there may be some wiggle room for the orchard term together with shrubs, clearly it doesn’t make these shrubs trees. Looking at strawberry (and strawberries) values, the preferred key is “crop” https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=strawberry#values
This looks to me like a classic example of lingustic confusion in OSM.
A strawberry farm is not an orchard (in English), because an orchard has trees and strawberry plants aren’t trees.
But try translating orchard into German. The closest translation is Obstplantage, and that is the translation the German wiki uses. The closest translation back into English of that word is fruit farm. A strawberry farm is a fruit farm, so the German wiki effectively says to use landuse=orchard for any fruit farm.
A strawberry farm is a fruit farm, so the German wiki effectively says to use landuse=orchard for any fruit farm.
it’s a wiki, we can fix it. Unfortunately there isn’t a specific word in German for orchard, because Obstplantage comprises more kinds of plants than orchard. Erdbeerplantage does not translate to orchard. There is also “Hain” but I am not sure whether it covers all kind of orchards (probably not)
BTW in Russian wiki it’s the same. And still, all wikies are basically translation of English one which says “may emphasize berry shrubs in preference to fruit trees.”
That’s why I mentioned crop as well in my first post and it does make sense. But either usage is very low (max few hundred worldwide) regardless, the same way we can say “use produce” or “use trees” or “use all together”.
When looking around in my area I’d only map fields that are used every year which they probably aren’t because it’s not good for crop yield.
What I’d be inclined to do in my area would be: At the beginning of the season, when the location is known, set a node with something like shop=farm, seasonal=yes (Summer won’t start for another week), and a note or a fixme instructing myself and any other user to delete the node after the season because the location of next years strawberry field is not yet known
BTW in Russian wiki it’s the same. And still, all wikies are basically translation of English one which says “may emphasize berry shrubs in preference to fruit trees.”
strawberries aren’t berries though, and the plants they grow on aren’t shrubs.
If real-world distinctions in English matter at all, then strawberry crops grow in fields on farms, not in orchards. (This was confirmed in a famous 1967 case in the UK.) Some gardens are also given over to strawberries, but not arboretums.
Different languages make conflicting distinctions. For example, in Vietnamese, the word for “orchard”, vườn cây ăn quả, literally means “edible fruit tree garden”, not unlike in German. Strawberries literally grow on “trees” in a “garden”. Then again, grapes, melons, carrots, and even rice grows on “trees”.
What probably matters more to this project is the kind of distinction that a map would make in any language, to the extent that there are common cartographic treatments across cultures. In my experience, when a map for laypeople indicates agricultural land use, it tends to distinguish between crop fields, vineyards, and orchards, essentially a classification based on the method of growing and harvesting. If the map needs to depict rubber plantations or cranberry bogs, it’ll tend to give them a unique treatment or clarify them with a label.
That said, I’m mostly only familiar with English-language maps; the few Portuguese and French maps in my possession may be subject to the same bias. If another culture strictly classifies farmland by the food group of the harvest, do keys such as crop, produce, or species provide enough detail to accomplish those distinctions?
