Having finally collected a full list of farms serving the Corvallis Farmer’s Market, I have a fork in the road ahead as to what kind of data I shall collect, and what type of spatial problem I shall analyze.  On Saturday I sent out a survey to the email accounts I had among the farms on my list, about 50 out of the 114 farms on my list.  As of today, 18 have responded.  That is a high rate of response for one email.  One trend I have noticed is that over the past decade a new business model is emerging: small acreage, high quality, sustainably grown produce intended for local markets.  I could continue down this path by surveying the remaining farms over the phone and with additional rounds of emails.  My question would be whether farms nearer to Corvallis tend to be newer in ownership and smaller in size at a statistically significant level, indicating that Corvallis as an urban center is supporting and driving this new business model.  I would continue to collect information on local farms through the First Alternative Co-op and through local wholesale distributors.

An alternative strategy is to consider the Farmer’s Markets of other cities in the Willamette Valley.  Salem and Portland both have very detailed information on their vendors, and Eugene has somewhat fewer, about 50 farms total listed.  Then I can ask whether the size of the city, determined by the area of the city limits polygon data, is predictive of the number of farms serving their Farmer’s Market, or if some cities have more Farmer’s Market relative to others, after considering the relative size of the urban centers.

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The Extent of the Problem

To those of you who struggled to help me this last week with a “bug” in my points layer, I am happy to announce a fix for the problem.  The “extent” setting in my Geoprocessing Environment was set – why I don’t know – to an area much smaller than the file on which I was working.  I changed the extent to cover the full area of all layers in the file, and suddenly the excluded points in my point layer started responding to field calculations and tool actions.  What a pain!  Glad to have it over with.

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Python R U Talking?

Some of you also know I have been wrestling with a Python script intended to take GIS info, call R to perform some function on it, and then import the results back into ArcGIS.  Well I finally got it to work, but it wasn’t easy.  The R Toolbox that Mark Janakis made had some bugs in both the Python script and the R script, at least the way it worked for my version of R, and debugging was trial and error.  But I am sure you will hear about it in my Tutorial later.  Peace!