| Resource Inventory: Agricultural Districts Mapping Program | |
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The Cornell Institute for Resource Information Sciences (IRIS) facilitates the Agricultural Districts Mapping Program (ADMP) on behalf of the N.Y.S. Department of Agriculture and Markets (A&M). The primary responsibility of IRIS is to support ADMP efforts by providing consulting services, and to review, distribute and archive maps to all of the participating units of local government and responsible state agencies.
These data can be viewed through the Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository (CUGIR), in the ArcInfo export (.e00 file format). |
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The Agricultural Districts Law was enacted in 1971 as a means of preserving farmland. The enabling legislation provided for the formation of agricultural districts in New York, with a minimum of 500 productive acres of farmland as a basic requirement for district formation. A major incentive in the law is the agricultural value assessment designed to provide a partial exemption from taxation for farmland where urban pressure causes the market value of the land to exceed the value of the land in agricultural production.
There are 52 counties participating in the program, with 390 districts formed that represent about eight million acres of land. IRIS collaborated with A&M to convert the existing analog maps into electronic format through scanning. The objective is to increase accessibility of the data to a wider audience of users and the development of a standardized digital database for the program.