Online cartograms are the basis for precision agriculture

Cartogram is an important tool in precision agriculture. It is a contour geographic map that use varying degrees of color saturation to represent the relative intensity of any soil parameter within each mapped geozone or entire farm. It helps farmers effectively manage their fields, optimize resource use, and increase yields. Cartograms are used to visualize data on various aspects of a field, such as humus content, nutrient availability, pH level, soil moisture, soil density, mechanical composition, yield, crop condition, and more.

The Soft.Farm team of specialists has developed a solution for determining the properties of soils on which agricultural crops are grown. The system's functionality offers to quickly group information obtained after conducting soil agrodiagnostics by specialized laboratories, as well as to perform high-quality data analytics. You can create cartograms in the Soft.Farm web service free of charge. To do this, just register or log in at https://www.soft.farm/en/. Next, you need to create and download a template in Excel format in the "Technology" menu - "Cartograms" section - the "+ Cartogram" button, and the information is immediately visualized in the program.

Thanks to its intuitive interface, Soft.Farm allows you to create cartograms yourself. You do not need special additional knowledge and skills in working with complex software to use the system. The web service has combined several methods for creating cartograms recognized by the world community. These are the Kriging, Voronoi and Bezier methods, each of which can be used for calculation. In addition to easy uploading of documents from laboratories, Soft.Farm automatically imports data from Skok Agro penetrometers to the server.

There are two ways to create a cartogram in the web service:

- manually by points, using the "+ Cartogram" button. To do this, select at least 3 points in the desired geofence, specify the necessary parameters for them and add coordinates. A separate map will be created for each specified parameter, which can be edited and viewed in map mode or as a table, and if necessary, export the map data to Excel;

- use an existing file (.2020, .shp, ISO XML, etc. formats) by clicking the "+ Create from file" button. You can upload files created by yourself or received from external systems, such as John Deere and Precision Planting. They can map singulation, seed rate, differential application rate, yield or machine-specific data, allowing you to assess the efficiency of each section of the drill and the entire unit as a whole during any technological operation.

The created cartograms are available for further analysis and comparison with yield maps, NDVI satellite images, soil chemical analysis results, etc. Another feature of creating cartograms in Soft.Farm is the automatic calculation of area. However, it is not just numbers: the number of areas with different chemical and physical properties is calculated. In this way, a breakdown is made by the content of elements and it is possible to identify zones with a high, medium or low content of a certain substance in a separate field or across the entire farm as a whole. This allows the agricultural enterprise to correctly build a system for providing soil with nutrients, calculate the amount of fertilizers, applying them in the required amount and where they will bring the most benefit, and optimize financial costs.

Use the "Cartograms" module in the Soft.Farm system, as it is a convenient tool that can help in making better decisions regarding the management of your land bank.