Add fields and draw boundaries

Farm and field: what is the difference?

A farm holds the location, the weather point and the farm size. Fields are the parcels inside it: each one carries its own crop, season, acres, optional boundary and record log. Forecasts and alerts stay with the farm.

Add a field

1. In My Farms, open the farm with View Details.
2. Under Fields, choose Add field.
3. Type a Field name (required, up to 80 characters). A legal land description such as NE 12-34-5 W3 works well.
4. Optionally type the Crop (up to 60 characters) and the Season year (2000 to 2100; it starts as the current year).
5. Optionally type Acres: more than 0 and up to 100,000.
6. Optionally add Notes (up to 2,000 characters).
7. Choose Add field. The field appears in the list with badges for its crop, season and acres.

Draw a boundary

1. In the field form, beside Boundary (optional), choose Draw on map. The map opens centred on the farm's weather point; pan and zoom to the field.
2. Tap or click the map at each corner of the field. You need at least three corners, and the outline closes itself.
3. Use Undo corner to remove the last corner, or Clear to start again.
4. Once there are three or more corners, a Use mapped … ac button shows the calculated area. Choose it to copy that figure into Acres, or keep the acres you typed.
5. Save the field. A field with a boundary shows a Mapped badge.

To change a boundary later, use the field's pencil icon. The saved outline reappears: you can add corners, undo the last one or clear it and redraw. Individual corners cannot be dragged.

How the area is calculated

• The area comes from the corners you place, using a spherical-earth formula on the WGS84 radius (6,378,137 m) and 4,046.8564224 square metres per acre. It is rounded to two decimal places.
• Every corner must fall inside a box around Canada, and the outline must close. Otherwise the form says the boundary is not a valid polygon in Canada.
• Field acres are entered and shown in acres, even when Settings → Units is set to hectares.
• The stored shape can hold cut-outs, but the drawing tool only draws the outer outline. To leave out a slough or yard site, adjust the Acres figure yourself.

Delete a field

The bin icon beside a field asks for confirmation, then removes the field and all of its records. It cannot be undone.

Limits

• The calculated area is an estimate from corners placed on a web map. It is not a survey, a legal boundary or a land-title record.
• Boundaries are not shown on the Farm Map yet; showing field outlines there is on the roadmap.
• There is no file import for boundaries (for example shapefile or KML) and no satellite imagery or crop monitoring.
• Forecasts and alerts are not calculated for each field; they use the farm's weather point.