The data used to generate these maps was collected from the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). The data was delivered in a .csv format and consisted of 21 columns and 19,255 rows. The data features consisted of:
County Information
Number of Organic Operations
Value of Sales
Acreage
This data was pre-processed so that it would be ready to generate maps in GIS. In order to prepare the data the following steps were taken.
Clean the data to make sure there are no duplicates of any information.
Remove any unnecessary columns such as ZIP Code, watershed code, etc.
Isolate the desired data item such as Farm Operations, Organic - Number of Operations
Select the appropriate Domain and Domain Category such as Organic Status, Exempt/Certified
Separate the data for each desired commodity.
Remove any non-numeric characters from the column that contains the values for each desired data item.
Using the data, maps were created using ArcMap on GIS. ArcMap was accessed through a version of the software provided to students at Penn State. The maps created aim to show commodities on the county level. The final dataset used to create the maps consisted of these main commodities :
Farm Operations
Agricultural Land
Commodity Totals
These commodities were used to filter the dataset and create three unique subsets while keeping the columns containing county names, state names, and Value. The subsets were then added to a base map, which consisted of county borders, on ArcGIS.