Representing Farmland in a map

[Zanzos]

How would you denote heavy agriculture in an area?

Sorry if this is the wrong place

Z

[Mouse]

The usual place to ask questions is in the How Do I forum, where they are more likely to get due attention from the 'people who know stuff', but no sweat - you haven't committed a crime or anything

Everyone has different ways of representing agriculture. It depends a lot on the scale and style of your map.

For example if you are working at a scale where individual fields would be too small to depict, then straight lines and a general patchwork of flowing rectangles depicting the hard line between flat areas and woodland areas might be good. Toads that appear to kink around a field system, and dead straight drainage or irrigation lines leading to and from rivers.

At a smaller scale (that's actually zoomed in, like from 1:10,000 down to 1:1250, which is a smaller scale ratio, but where everything is much larger on the map) if the fields are visible then draw them - including plough lines. If you are mapping in colour you could also use colour to show different crops.

Hope that kind of helps a bit?

EDIT: I meant 'Roads', not 'Toads', but I decided to leave it in for a giggle

[Redrobes]

Just a small point of correction before it becomes ingrained in peoples heads...

Large scale is close up, small scale is far out. So 1:1250 and 1:10000 is large scale and 1:500000 is small scale. This is because it is 1 divided by the other number to give the scale so a half millionth is a lot smaller than one ten thousanth.

[Mouse]

Oops my bad. Maybe I was taught wrong?

I always thought that large scale was when the big number was.... well.... big

Sorry Zanzos!

[waldronate]

Redrobes is pointing out the use of "scale" in cartography jargon (it's a technical term with a precise meaning used in the context of a particular group).

For normal folks, a "large scale" activity is an activity involving lots of lots of things, while a "small scale" activity is one that involves few things. Normies naturally think that a map that has lots of distance units ought to be large scale, while one with just a few distance units ought to be small scale. But they are WRONG. In public. On the Internet. Because cartographers said so.

[Josiah VE]

Once of my favorite ways farmlands is denoted on a map is done by Jon Roberts on his "Ember In the Ashes Map": http://www.fantasticmaps.com/2015/05...-in-the-ashes/

[Hai-Etlik]

Oops my bad. Maybe I was taught wrong?

I always thought that large scale was when the big number was.... well.... big

Sorry Zanzos!

You sort of have it right, it's just that you aren't looking at the entirety of the number, just the denominator of a fraction. 2,000,000 may be bigger than 1,000, but 1:2,000,000 (0.0000005) is smaller than 1:1,000 (0.001).

[Hai-Etlik]

What is the map for and why does it need to indicate where heavy agriculture is? Why you are representing something plays a big part in how you represent it. Maps are functional things and have a purpose. It's important to keep the purpose of a particular map in mind while you create it.

What else is being represented on the map? An important part of symbol design is maintaining contrast with other symbols. Presumably if you specified "heavy" agriculture you are contrasting it with some other sort of agriculture.

What exactly is "heavy" agriculture in this context?

Is this map meant to be be "in character" for some particular setting? (Trying to look like it was produced in a medieval, renaissance, industrial, etc setting) Or to be evocative of a setting/genre without aiming to appear as a realistic product of it? (The "Trying to look Sci-Fi map" or the "Obviously done on a computer Fantasy map")

[Mouse]

Here are just a few more thoughts that are relatively random suggestions compared to Hai-Etlik's excellent analysis

Heavy agriculture isn't a term I'm familiar with. I think more of intensive farming and extensive farming. The former being characterised by market gardening, which is found more around cities or on good soil where there is space to build huge greenhouses and use hydroponic growing systems, while extensive farming is usually stereotypically characterised more by hill farming livestock that roam across unfenced moorland pastures.

To represent intensive farming (and depending on scale) I would draw the greenhouse systems, or lots of contrasting plots and strips in a close packed pattern. (intensive farming also includes those horrible sheds where animals are kept in tiny cages!)

To represent the extensive farming I would draw a map showing little farmsteads dotted quite a distance apart from one another, and maybe give some indication of paths worn by livestock passing through bottlenecks like gates from area to area, and add a couple of winter feeding sites where the ground has become puddled to mud around the drop point for bales of winter fodder. Also any water pumping sheds associated with water troughs, and the tracks leading to and from the troughs.

[Hai-Etlik]

Here are just a few more thoughts that are relatively random suggestions compared to Hai-Etlik's excellent analysis

Heavy agriculture isn't a term I'm familiar with. I think more of intensive farming and extensive farming. The former being characterised by market gardening, which is found more around cities or on good soil where there is space to build huge greenhouses and use hydroponic growing systems, while extensive farming is usually stereotypically characterised more by hill farming livestock that roam across unfenced moorland pastures.

To represent intensive farming (and depending on scale) I would draw the greenhouse systems, or lots of contrasting plots and strips in a close packed pattern. (intensive farming also includes those horrible sheds where animals are kept in tiny cages!)

To represent the extensive farming I would draw a map showing little farmsteads dotted quite a distance apart from one another, and maybe give some indication of paths worn by livestock passing through bottlenecks like gates from area to area, and add a couple of winter feeding sites where the ground has become puddled to mud around the drop point for bales of winter fodder. Also any water pumping sheds associated with water troughs, and the tracks leading to and from the troughs.

This actually raises another point, creating information to be presented vs representing that information. It may or may not be appropriate to represent things like individual farms or fields depending on the map. If it is appropriate then the question of how to create the information about their distribution is quite a different one from how to represent farmland that you have already established the location of. If you're not representing individual fields, then a representation evocative of those fields in the abstract may be appropriate, or it may be far too noisy or confusing.

For instance, this map https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...chmentid=52614 represents farmland as a pattern evocative fields, but not representing specific fields in the same way the forest is represented by tree symbols that are not representing specific trees. If you do that it's important not to draw your map in a way that suggests that the symbol is representing specific actual features. Putting things in a map that look like they are saying something they aren't is bad cartography.