Loss of Prime Farmland in Easton, Massachusetts

Description: Maggie Payne is a resource soil scientist who is trying to figure out how much prime farmland area has been lost to impervious surface, such as paved parking lots. What we are looking at is the amount of area that is agricultural land, what is it useful for and how can we preserve it. This project is to assist in providing visual data to calculate how much farmland has been lost and if there is a relation to consequences of urbanization.

Table 1:

	Count (meters)	Square kilometers
Total study area	82,872	8.29
Prime farmland	92,272	9.23
Farmland of statewide importance	259,205	25.92
Farmland of unique importance	117,147	11.71

Table 2:

	Count (meters)	Square kilometers
Prime farmland lost	15,427	1.54
Farmland of statewide importance lost	37,403	3.74
Farmland of unique importance lost	1,689	0.17

Process: We looked at soil data in the town of Easton, Massachusetts. To do that, we first extracted the soil data and combined it within the area of the town. Looking at the new combined data, we got the total number of meters for the total study area size. We then created subsets of geographic data including Prime Farmland, Farmland of statewide importance and Farmland of unique importance. We did that by combining the common field between both data sets. Then again, we then looked at the statistical sum of each subset to get the total count in meters. To get our answer in square kilometers we took our count in meters times 100 and then times 0.0001. We did that for each subset. For each subset, we determined the amount of farmland that has been lost. We created a new text field in our data set. From there, we got our new statics for Prime farmland lost, Farmland of statewide importance lost and Farmland of unique importance lost. From our data we created a map (below) to depict how much farmland has been lost in Easton, Massachusetts. 

Results: From table 1, the total study area size is 82,872 meters or 8.29 square kilometers. The prime farmland is 92,272 meters, or 9.23 square kilometers. The farmland of statewide importance is 259,205 meters, or 25.92 square kilometers. The farmland of unique importance is 117,147 meters, or 11.71 square kilometers. In table 2, the total prime farmland lost is 15,427 meters, or 1.54 square kilometers. The farmland of statewide importance lost is 37,403 meters, or 3.74 square kilometers. The farmland of unique importance lost is 1,689 meters, or 0.17 square kilometers.

Conclusions: Our data shows that the numbers are highest in amount of area of valuable farmland of statewide importance and the amount of farmland of statewide importance that has been lost. Which means, that there is in fact, a relation of how much urbanization affects how much valuable farmland that has been lost. Maggie Payne discussed that factors like ground conditions where not documented when the maps were made, or how much urban land was dominated by impervious surfaces at the time of mapping, as well as the time some of the data was taken.