California Agricultural Value (2018)

Data used to create the agricultural value logic model includes:

Farmland Status - An index of current farmland status based on the Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program including agricultural areas not mapped by the Department of Conservation by using the Department of Water Resources Cropland Data Layer (produced by Land IQ).

Soil Capacity - A ranking of agricultural soil capabilities based upon both the CA storie index and the irrigated capability index.

Soil Impairment - A ranking of agricultural soil impairment based upon both the relative salinity and sodicity of soils.

Climate Rarity - A ranking of climate rarity performed by identifying 5 different types of agricultural climates within California and ranking them based on percent cover within the state.

The updates made to this include new data from the Department of Conservation's Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program for 2016. Not all counties were updated as of March 2018) so there is some data from FMMP that is from the 2014 update. Additionally new areas were included in this analysis beyond the areas identified by FMMP mapping from new cropland data mapping conducted by Land IQ for the California Department of Water Resources. That layer is available here url: https://databasin.org/datasets/6cc5b24e401043a899a6db6eef5c86db.

These new areas included necessitated a new climate rarity grouping analysis ran. Central coast farmland still came out as the most rare agricultural climate in the state.

Finally the most updated SSURGO soils data was brought in from a 2017 release by USDA. The weights used were 3 for Soil Capacity, 2 for Farmland Status, 3 for Soil Impairment, and 1 for Climate Rarity. This was selected in the final union to highlight areas based upon the underlying soil attributes primarily with existing ranking and climate rarity each rated less important.