The Sidwell Company to Provide Agricultural Assessment Solution to Ramsey County, ND
Wednesday May 28th 2008
Filed Under Sidwell
For Immediate Release
May 28, 2008
Media Contact: Karen Fouts, CMS
Marketing Manager
kfouts@sidwellco.com
St. Charles, IL – The Sidwell Company is providing digital agricultural parcel file development services to Ramsey County, North Dakota, to aid the jurisdiction’s assessment officials in efficiently calculating soils valuations for agricultural parcels to meet new state-mandated agricultural assessment standards. Specifically, Sidwell is developing a digital GIS parcel file for all of the county’s agricultural parcels, along with the soils map layer, Common Land Unit modifier layer, and associated attribute tables. Soils computations services will then be performed using Sidwell’s Farmla nd Assessment and Report Management System (FARMS™)—an ESRI ArcGIS®-compliant software solution for agricultural assessments.
Additionally, Sidwell is providing shared on-site training in a centralized location to Ramsey County, along with the North Dakota counties of Eddy, Foster, Kidder and Towner, who have also contracted for agricultural assessment services, to help defray the costs of this project component for each jurisdiction. The specialized training program w ill f ocus on the use of the FARMS™ software extension within ArcGIS® 9.2, covering basic operations for processing agricultural parcels, all processing and reporting tools in the system, and user customizations within the reporting application. Implementation of this project also includes the installation and configuration of FARMS™ at Ramsey Cou nty< /SPAN> for continued use and maintenance of the agricultural database.
In response to recent flooding in the area, Ramsey County Tax Director, Jerry Ratzlaff, also needs an automated and accurate process for adjusting parcel area changes in the inundated lands surrounding the County’s lakes. Sidwell will use LiDAR data of Ramsey County, supplied by FEMA, to create polygon layers based on the predicted and actual elevations of the lakes that can be used for analysis and comparison.
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FARMS™ is a true GIS-based application developed by The Sidwell Company that is designed for use in the creation and analysis of datasets related to the process of agricultural real estate assessment. For more information about FARMS and Parcel Builder™ (Sidwell’s premier parcel mapping solution), or about the company’s GIS, aerial photography, photogrammetric and mapping services, call 877.SIDWELL (877.743-9355), or visit their websites at www.ParcelBuilder.com or www.sidwellco.com.
ESRI and ArcGIS 9.2 are licensed trademarks of ESRI. For more information about GIS industry leader ESRI, contact the company at 800.GIS.XPRT (800.447.9778) or visit them on the web at www.esri.com.