Raster Data Set

Loss of Prime Farmland in Foxborough, MA

According to Maggie Payne’s presentation on soils it is important to know where the primary soils are located in order to save and conserve them. Farmlands across America provide us with the food we eat, rural heritage, wildlife and biodiversity and environmental quality but as the primary soils are paved over by impervious surfaces due to urbanization we lose that soil for good.
 

Table 1	Count	Square kilometers
Total study area size	539874	2184.79
Prime farmland	113444	459.09
Farmland of statewide importance	14855	60.11
Farmland of unique importance	37195	150.52

  

Table 2	Count	Square kilometers
Prime farmland lost	113391	45887.70
Farmland of statewide importance lost	14829	60010.83
Farmland of unique importance lost	37129	15025.57

The process was performed by extracting a mask of an area of study and then joining the attributes with the mapunit table that provided soil data from the geodatabase. The joining process provided us with information about the location of farmland soils. Below is table 1 showing the total area of farmland types for Foxborough Massachusetts.

The results of table 2 show the lost of farmland to be quite significant to table 1 that show the amount of farmland. The majority of the farmland lost is due to urbanization that causes impervious surfaces.