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Creating a farm map
A farm map is not explicitly required by the NOP Standards as part of the Organic System Plan, but it's widely accepted as the easiest and best way to help inspectors and certifiers understand your operation and in particular to show that border and buffer requirements are being met.
Some people have artistic talent and create beautiful farm maps showing detailed aspects of their entire operation. This is great, but it's not required. The key is to indicate all of your fields, assign each a unique number and have these numbers correspond to those listed on your Field History sheets (part of the Organic Farm Plan). You should also indicate adjoining land uses and buffer zones. Vegetable growers may want to assign bed numbers within fields to indicate field operations at a finer level. Storage units, buildings, roadways, water sources, greenhouses and conservation areas such as wetlands or woodlots are other essential items to identify.
Many farmers use aerial photo-maps provided by their local Farm Services Agency office. If the detail on the photo is too distracting, try tracing the major features onto a clean sheet of paper and using that to create your farm map template. Making multiple blank copies of this template to fill out each year with annual rotations creates an invaluable graphic record for your farm's files.
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