In 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln founded the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he called it the "people's department." In Lincoln's day, 48 percent of those people or the population was farmers who needed good seeds and information to grow their crops.
In 1933, the Agricultural Adjustment Act established farm programs designed to balance production and stabilize farm produce prices. Farmers, or producers, who participated in the farm programs needed to have accurate measurements made of their fields.
"Precise" survey measurements were made by carrying chains around the farmer's field, and then maps of the field were drawn by hand. A more accurate, inexpensive and efficient method was needed to measure the millions of acres of farmland across the United States. The use of aerial photographs to calculate acreage would replace this cumbersome method and in 1940's the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) under then named Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) established two aerial photography labs; one in Asheville, North Carolina and another in Salt Lake City, Utah. By 1976 photo production was consolidated to the Salt Lake location of the Aerial Photography Field Office (APFO).
At that time, the mission of APFO was to provide rectified aerial photographs for accurate field measurement. Field measurements were made from aerial enlargements with a planimeter. These annotated enlargements served as the basic record of producer land use information for each county office to administer programs.
Today, geographic information systems (GIS) can be applied to that basic record to reflect any changes to the producer's participation in farm programs. APFO continues to provide aerial imagery and corresponding data for Farm Service Agency customers as well as other state, local and federal governments and the public.
Some of the old ways...
A Planimeter
A chemical room
Old inspection methods
Creating a mosaic
An old camera
Some of the new ways...
An Epsilon Durst LED photo printer
An LH Scanner
Computer Hardware
Plotter and Working Index
A little bit of both...
A Log E-Printer
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