Loss of Prime Farmland in Easton, Massachusetts

Description:

Prime farmland soils are utilized for food production and overall health of our environment and are being affected due to the process of urbanization. This application is representing the total area of farmland that has been lost due to impervious features, such as paved parking lots in the town Easton, Massachusetts. The overall goal of the project is to calculate the total loss of farmland due to development within Easton. 

Process:

To begin this process the team created a map representing our study area, which is the town of Easton, Massachusetts. We then added the soils data which contains the three farmland categories (prime farmland, farmland of statewide importance, and farmland of unique importance) that we would be collecting information for. To do this, we separated the cells that represented the town of Easton and combined them to the soil data. The team then combined an additional subset to the map which contained the data representing impervious areas. To do this we had to separate the cells representing our study area. We then combined the amount of farmland lost for each of the farmland categories. Before we can combine them, we had to create a new field within the table of attributes to make it work properly. In order to collect the statistics of the amount of area farmland lost within the three farmland categories we repeated the process of viewing the statistics given by the table of attributes.

Results: The data collected for our study area represents the total study area size, the amount of farmland, farmland of statewide importance, farmland of unique importance, as well as all three of these categories in comparison to the amount of farmland lost within them. The total area size of the town of Easton equals to be .75 square kilometers. Refer to Table 1 and Table 2 for results. 

Conclusions:

 Maggie Payne, a resource soil scientist presented information that made this study easier to comprehend. She explained the importance of why each of these farmland categories which highlighted the importance of the entire study. There was not many limitations to the study or the process of data collection, but one thing that may make the study more effective is knowing what makes an area impervious. Right now, all that we know is that there is impervious areas that resulted in loss of farmland but we do not know what that impervious land is. I also think that having a timeline of when the land was taken would be interesting because then researchers could look further into if there were efforts to stop the land from being taken.