Land type

CLEM.Resources.LandType

A land type is an area of land with the same characteristics such as soil type and form.

The definition of a Land Type in CLEM is flexible, allowing the user to customise the simulation for the required farming system and simulation purpose. In general a Land Type is a homogeneous area of land, whether that relates to soil type and plant productivity, land dollar value, or even simply set aside for a particular management task in the farm plan and tracked independently. This means there is no right or wrong way to set up land for your farm. The following sections provide the Land type setup needed for the various approaches.

Considering soil type on plant production

As the characteristics of the land (e.g. soil type and land form) influence plant production, we need to separate the farm based on soil for activities relating to crop and pasture production. Therefore each Land type provided for a farm would relate to the total area of the associated soil type, with each identified by a Land Type Index (label) that is be used to link to the appropriate plant production input data. If your farm contains only a single type, or there is no soil type considered in input data, you only need to specify a single land type with the area of the farm.

Specified management areas

There may be a requirement to separate land for particular purposes such that activities only have access to the land area previously identified for the task. You can add Land types for this reason, however this is not recommended as there will be limited ability to use underutilized land.

It is worth noting that a Land Type is not a paddock or field in the sense of a fenced area, but represents the total area of land available of the type. Various crop and pasture management activities will request land from this source and use the area assigned. Paddocks are managed by the crop and pasture management activities and associated Graze food store type and are assumed to be of a single Land type (i.e. no paddocks allowed with multiple soil types present).

Land dollar value

There may be a need to divide land based on land dollar value for accounting. In this case an areas of land may be defined with a Land types and associated prices. This pricing could include the value of infrastructure on the land, or may be highly productive land on which crop production is highest or irrigation equipment is available.

Bunded land

Often farms will undertake bunding and have different management in bunded areas to the interbund spaces. CLEM requires that these bunded and interbund areas are defined as separate Land types. If the interbund space is to be grazed it should be combined with the other unallocated land.

The following parameters are associated with this resource

The area of this Land type. The units are specified in Land

This property will automatically account for the proportion of this Land type that is taken up by buildings, roads, paths etc. and therefore unavailable for farming activities. This parameter allows the user to automatically remove the land taken up by infrastructure, but this is not reported or able to change through time. Alternatively, you could remove the this area of land from the total land available, or even add it as another land type if it has a different dollar value that needs to be accounted for.

This value is provided for ease of assigning the area of land and will request this proportion of the land area requested above. This is useful if you want to allocate proportions of the whole farm to land areas, or allocate bunded areas as a proportion of a known area.

The unique index representing this Land type. You will need to ensure that this index matches that reported for the given land (soil) in the input data files.

Required Text based label can be characters or numeric

See also