View Full Version : Farm lands any ideas?

Chris van der Heijden
01-11-2014, 06:08 AM
Haw can you draw farmlands the best in a map? I always use straight lines but I really do not like this. Any ideas?

01-11-2014, 10:49 AM
Well, I don't know about maps, but... Well, I know how to read, and I dislike maps in books that have perfect squares with perfect lines. farmlands don't have straight lines :P

Furrows in fields are bumpy. In MODERN times, there are some fancier farms that can flatten the terrain before planting, but most can't. So those and other fields have to work with the soil they got.

Also the rows alternate - you need spaces to walk between the rows of crops without damaging them. So I assume that on colored maps the colors would alternate - crops, then dirt, then crops, and so on. That's probably where the lines come in on maps which aren't colored, but even these look more real to me with a bit of shading. Grazing areas wouldn't have lines at all - it's just grass, really.

Farm PLOTS do tend to have rather rigid dividing lines, but they are rarely square. Long ago, though, it would have been as straight as a man without modern tools could make a fence (to keep the animals out of the crops) or to plant a hedge to separate his property from his neighbor's. Now it's as straight as you can drive.

Also, in modern times, people have better equipment, so regardless how much land they own, they're able to farm more of it. So (modern) people can plant plot after plot, all touching... but older societies would have smaller, more scattered plots, taking advantage of the best pieces of land. This still also means that, if the best soil for corn juts out in a weird shaped area, you plant corn in that are.


To make this more map-related, I'll jack a couple of shots from google maps.


01-13-2014, 04:25 PM
Well, it depends a great deal on what you are trying to accomplish. You'd do it in quite different ways on a cadastral map showing land ownership, a thematic map showing a correlation between crop yield and elevation, a topographic map for overland navigation. Scale is going to play a big factor too, as are the constraints of the medium and the information available.

For certain cases where I just want to say "this area is generally use for agriculture" I'm quite pleased with the result I get from chopping the area into evenly sized by irregularly arranged cells (I compute a Poisson disc distribution then find the Voronoi diagram of it) Inset the cells slightly, and then select a random orientation, dash pattern, and spacing for each and draw furrow lines, and then give the lines a bit of random jitter.