Stephen Cadogan: Online tools for mapping farmland a step up from Google Earth
The satellite pics are just the latest example of how everything on your farm is mapped and can be seen by anyone, anywhere, on their computer.
There were over 500 views within a couple of days of a recent Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine presentation on the department’s social media channels.
The presentation showed how anyone can use the Copernicus browser to see all the latest images of the farmland of Ireland.
It was on the Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine’s social media in order to show how the browser can be used to assess wind damage to Ireland’s forestry plantations.
But a lot of viewers, many of them for the first time, were probably fascinated to see the pictures of the Irish countryside — including their home areas — from an altitude of hundreds of kilometres.
The satellite images are just the latest example of how everything on your farm is mapped and can be seen by anyone, anywhere, on their computer.
It’s a big step on from Google Earth, which you can use to check out the appearance of your farm when the Google car passed (decades ago in many cases).
There are also many computerised maps which any member of the public can use to check for water, soil, archaeological, and environment information on every acre in the country. However, farmers will probably better appreciate the satellite view in its 40 shades of green. (You can even judge how well the neighbour’s grass is growing).
So have a look at the Youtube video of Frank Barrett, of the Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine’s forest service, and follow his steps through the European Commission’s Copernicus browser for viewing images from the Sentinel constellation of satellites.
Follow him as he does a web search on Google for the browser.
When you find it, you can log in anonymously. However, if you register and log in, extra tools and services are available. You’ll see a web map system with a series of tools on the right-hand side of the screen, plus search tools.
The Sentinel 2 satellite provides high-resolution images for monitoring vegetation, soil, water cover, etc.
A fascination for farmers is that these are the images used by skilled Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine officials to inspect the farms of Ireland on their office computers — because this is, of course, the modern EU method of regular and systematic observation and assessment of agricultural activities and practices.
Since January 1, 2023, inspection of images taken by Copernicus Sentinel satellites has been a mandatory feature of the Common Agriculture Policy for EU member states.
This is the Area Monitoring System (Ams) for checking the area-based schemes of payments to farmers for compliance. In Ireland, that means monitoring all the land parcels declared by over 120,000 farmers on their Basic Income Support for Sustainability (Biss) applications, to provide assurance on over €1.5bn in scheme payments per year.
For example, it is used to find areas which may be ineligible for Biss because they were burned. The satellite maps also reveal land use changes.
This has replaced the previous inspection regime, where 5% of farms were selected and visited for land eligibility inspections.
Any farmers who felt self-conscious about a satellite 786km photographing their land every five days may feel more paranoid than ever when they watch the department’s video and realise that anyone with a computer can inspect these images.
Zoom in to whatever area in Ireland you are interested in.
In the video, Frank Barrett showed how to bring up the latest imagery for a location, and to add earlier images to a comparison tool if you are interested in changes over time in the landscape. Some images are cloud-covered, but it’s easy to find comparable cloud-free images.
On the browser, you can even make a rough estimate of the acreage damaged using a measuring tool.
You can also look at false colour imagery to distinguish between vegetations, crops, or tree species. You can create a movie or an animation to show changes in time in any field or any farm in the country.
