Introducing GIS to Grass Seed Growers

The center of the grass seed industry of Oregon is §located in the Willamette Valley. Innovative grass §seed growers of the area are beginning to implement §precision agriculture GIS and GPS technologies on §their farms. To help growers learn how to work with §their spatial field data, a set of GIS lessons were §created using ESRI''s ArcGIS 9.0. The lessons teach §growers how to use GIS for managing, analyzing, and §interpreting their site-specific data. The lessons §were introduced to interested grass seed growers §through a series of three workshop meetings. From §the evaluations, growers indicated they were §interested in using GIS for investigating §correlations between yield and soil nutrients and §for creating prescription application maps. §Therefore methods for investigating correlations and §creating prescription maps were devised using both §Microsoft Excel and ArcGIS 9.0. Finally, a specific §task-based comparison of four different precision §agriculture GIS software packages to ArcGIS 9.0 was §completed to provide interested growers with §information needed when evaluating software options §available to them.