"What Was That?" -- Crops

Crops

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How to Use This Tool: Say you just flew over some interesting crop or field, and now you want to know what it is. Scroll down through some of the possibilities below. If you find what you're looking for, you can open it in Google Earth by clicking the Google Earth icon:

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Contour Farming - Plowing along elevation lines. You'll see this technique most often in hilly farmland, especially over Minnesota and Wisconsin. {read more}

Scale: Images are taken from an altitude of ~35,000 feet, and so are each ~1 mile across.

Open these examples in Google Earth, or download all of the landforms here.

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Center Pivot Irrigation - Crops are often planted in giant circles to facilitate center pivot irrigation: an irrigation technique where the water-distributing poles are fixed in the center of the field and rotated around in a circle. This type of irrigation is effective on flat land - expect to see it mostly in Kansas and Nebraska {read more}

Scale: Images are taken from an altitude of ~35,000 feet, and so are each ~1 mile across.

Open these examples in Google Earth, or download all of the landforms here.

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Level Basin Irrigation - Large, flat plots of land which are irrigated by channeling water directly into the basin. Rice paddies have made this method famous; however, other crops can use it too: alfalfa, citrus trees, and some cereals, for example. You can spot these from above by their weirdly-deformed rectangular shapes and various green colors. In the U.S., they're mostly concentrated around the Mississippi River Delta, especially in Arkansas {read more}

Scale: Images are taken from an altitude of ~35,000 feet, and so are each ~1 mile across.

Open these examples in Google Earth, or download all of the landforms here.

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Furrow Irrigation - Furrow irrigation uses small channels running down the sides and rows of fields to irrigate crops. {read more}

Scale: Images are taken from an altitude of ~35,000 feet, and so are each ~1 mile across.

Open these examples in Google Earth, or download all of the landforms here.

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Non-Farmed Hills - The forested hills in this Midwest view were left unfarmed, while the low-lying plains were plowed.