Talk:Key:crop

UK English

Beet is an American English, Beetroot is UK English and should be used in OSM. I have changed the page to reflect this. At present there are some 550 uses, mostly in northern Italy. I have made comment on a very few change sets and see what the response is. Warin61 (talk) 23:37, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Looks like there are many different kinds - sugarbeet being another main crop. So back to the generic 'beet'. Warin61 (talk) 01:04, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Crops only - no infrastructure

A glass house/ hot house is not in itself a crop. It is infrastructure to produce a crop. Same comment applies to irrigation. Warin61 (talk) 23:37, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Some crops, like those that grow in orchards, could be directly mapped; however, annual crops probably make up the lion's share of those grown in the world, and they disappear for part of the year. It would be a waste of mapper energy to remove and re-add s on a yearly basis, so we leave them in place; therefore what is being mapped is what remains the whole time, that being the infrastructure to produce that specific crop (soil, irrigation methods, etc.) which can be observed and from which the type of crop might be inferred no matter the season. Arlo James Barnes (talk) 01:54, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Crops only - no tree/field

Unless the area is a nursery then the crop is the produce e.g. a pear, not the tree e.g. pear_tree so the crop values should not have either tree nor field in it. Warin61 (talk) 23:17, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Crop Rotation

Where this occurs it may be better to be less specific e.g. crop=vegetables for instance. Or use multiple values as shown below. Warin61 (talk) 03:03, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Multiple values

Tag info indicates the use of the ; as a separator, similar to sport tag use. Warin61 (talk) 23:37, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Adding crop keys

We are currently in the process of collecting data for the OpenStreetMap app StreetComplete. Therefore we identified some missing crops, which we'd like to add.

See https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete/issues/368 for the whole project. Using a parser (https://github.com/rugk/crops-parser) we identified some missing crops. Before adding them, I'll list them here, so you can discuss anything if wanted:

Chillies and peppers- green 	crop=pepper 	orchard
Chillies and peppers- dry 	crop=pepper 	orchard 	
Jute & Jute-like Fibres 	crop=jute 	farmland
Jute 	 	 	 	crop=jute 	farmland
Vanilla 	 	 	crop=vanilla 	orchard
Sisal 	 	 	 	crop=sisal 	farmland
Cinnamon 	 	 	crop=cinnamon 	orchard

I'll add another list for the tree keys on the corresponding wiki page.

Happy to hear any feedback.

--rugk (talk) 19:07, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Added. --rugk (talk) 15:49, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Replace with produce key?

Should this key be replaced by produce=*? That looks to provide similar if not the same information, and it is better documented. Produce is also more usable across other keys for example shops=* as well as landuse=*. Taginfo is busy at the moment otherwise I'd compare the database usages. Warin61 (talk) 04:31, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

I don't think that this should be pursued. Which problem do you exactly have with the documentation?--Constantino (talk) 12:37, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

That comment was made almost 1 year ago. Since then there have been a few edits. The grouping and remove of unused values. The main problem I have is that the order of the thing is not an order I recognise ... so I find it disorganised. The group titles do not stand out nor are they shown in the contents. I also note the removal of a link to the produce key. So I have remove the link to crop from the produce key. This will mean mappers will find it harder to see the competing tags. I do think that the produce=* is usable across more keys that the crop key and so would be preferred by data consumers as it eases the data interpretation. Warin61 (talk) 23:38, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

"Preferred by data consumers" is such an weasel argument. Who are these actual data customers? For API customers it doesn't matter how many keys are there and for people rendering maps (like me) it costs them a little bit of performance to read in more keys. But on the other hand the style may need fewer exceptions if keys are only used with one feature.--Constantino (talk) 08:11, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

Hey, can you – all – please pull yourself together! It's totally useless to remove links to other pages, because they were removed from one page. You may not advertise/argue in a page for any other, but put them under "See also" if they have a logical relation to each other.

So, can you please re-add them? Just without any evaluation. Which tag is better can be discussed anyway, later – maybe actually on the mailing list though. --rugk (talk) 20:26, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

I agree that the 'see also' should have link to other pages - similar or complimentary or competing. I have no problem with the reinstatement of the crop link on the produce page provided similar occurs on the crop page. Discussion should be best placed on the tagging mailing list where there should be more people concerned with tags. However to alert people to thoughts these discussion pages serve those not on the mailing lists. To me the word 'produce' applies to more things than the word 'crop' e.g. beef is not a crop ..yet it is a produce. It would be better to use the more universal word so that mappers and data consumers have a common key that can be used for all things produced though a natural process of growing or breeding rather than have to have 2 keys - one for growing the other for breading. I did add the comment that produce appears to be a better key, if that is offensive remove the comment. Warin61 (talk) 00:03, 24 June 2018 (UTC)

@Warin61: Please just restore all the links you need. But what's the benefit of having a common key for different things?

The sentence "so that mappers and data consumers have a common key" is IMHO a total misunderstands of OSM, which you probably know better. Data consumers have to use the keys used by the mappers. Anything else just doesn't work.--Ryzen (talk) 20:07, 3 July 2018 (UTC)

Already restored the links on both sites, BTW. --rugk (talk) 16:07, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Grouping of table ..logical? or alphabetically?

The present table order is said to be 'logical'? I have no idea what that means in this context. Would it not be easier to group them alphabetically? Warin61 (talk) 06:45, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Re "Produce is not especially for forestry and animals but any produce including crops."

Warin61 wrote "Produce is not especially for forestry and animals but any produce including crops", but this is incorrect. See taginfo. 9 of the top 10 values of produce= are orchard, animal and forestry related. There is also rice used 1300 times, but crop=rice is used 50 times more often. The orchard produce are much more commonly (~100 times) tagged with trees=* instead. 31k out of the 43k uses of produce= are for forestry produce (top 2 values, combine to 25k alone) or animal produce. The remaining 12k uses of produce are mostly for orchard and vineyard products. There are about 2k or 3k total uses of produce=* as a synonym for crop=*. By comparison, crop is used >260k times total, with at least 150k uses for crops in the sense of grains, row crops, vs some others for grapes and orchard products). --Jeisenbe (talk) 03:59, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Changing the description of produce=* to "Describes a feature's agricultural output produced though a natural process of growing or breeding" is not helpful on this page, since it doesn't help mappers and database users know when the tag produce= would be more appropriate than crop=. My previous description, based on usage in taginfo, was that produce= is often used for forestry produce, aquaculture produce and animal produce. --Jeisenbe (talk) 05:48, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Appropriate Use

"when the tag produce= would be more appropriate than crop="? The produce=* is described as Describes a feature's agricultural output produced though a natural process of growing or breeding, that would include crops. Which key to use should be up to the mapper, and that decision should not be based on frequency of use but on the tag itself. Warin61 (talk) 01:13, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Re: "that decision should not be based on frequency of use but on the tag itself" - most OSM mappers do not follow your advice on this. Generally more common tags are preferred, which is helpful, since it reduces the rate of tag fragmentation. If you check historical usage charts, more popular tags continue to grow faster, and even wiki edits and approved proposals don't often change the momentum: see highway=bus_stop vs public_transport=platform and many other examples. --Jeisenbe (talk) 12:17, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Description

Perhaps the beast description is that used on the key it self. Should the key crop described as especially for rice' on the produce page? A key is not limited to the most frequent occurrences. Keep the judgement of which to use when up to the mapper. Warin61 (talk) 01:13, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Crop isn't especially for rice, it's especially for crops, and sometimes for forage (grasses), rarely for other types of produce (poultry, orchard fruits, etc), and looking at the table of used values in taginfo will show this - of course you don't just look at the first value, but at all of them. Where does the description come from, otherwise? If the tag never went through the proposal process, then the description should be based on how it is used. Often this matches the plain English language meaning of the value and key, but not always: for example, trees=* has always been used for shrubs and bushes like coffee and tea, perenial fruit-bearng herbs like bananas and even pineapples, because these are all the main plants found on landuse=orchard, which includes not only European orchards but all kinds of tropical plantations (agricultural land planted with perenials rather than annual crops). And these were approved tags; see Proposed_features/orchard for the history. OSM isn't as neat and tidy as we might like it to be. --Jeisenbe (talk) 12:17, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Status = de facto

The tag status should be "de facto" because:

1. The tag has been in use since 2010 and has been well established since 2013 (see taghistory.raifer.tech
2. Currently used over 250,000 times with many values >10k
3. No significant competition from other tags with the same meaning. Rarely produce=* is used for crop values, but the most common is rice: 1.3k uses of produce=rice vs >60k uses of crop=rice. The others are even more lopsided toward crop; there are only about 2k uses of produce for crops, vs over 150k uses of crop=* in this way. --Jeisenbe (talk) 04:03, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Changed Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 09:43, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Crop=yes, crop=no

Re: "crop=yes - Unspecified cropland. Not recommended as it adds no information at all, use a more specific value or do not add crop=*." by Mateusz Konieczny.

I think this isn't entirely true. Adding "crop=yes" is not very helpful, but it does say that there is a crop of some kind on this area of farmland, which shows that it isn't fallow, and that it's cropland rather than something else? Sometimes landuse=farmland could be used for meadow or pasture or livestock pens or orchards (though landuse=meadow, landuse=farmyard, landuse=orchard would be better in those cases), and crop=yes specifies that it isn't one of those other types of agricultural land.

Similarly, crop=no might mean the field is fallow, though I haven't checked. Probably it would be better to have fallow=yes or something similar, but these tags may have some meaning. --Jeisenbe (talk) 15:14, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

So long-term fallow can be tagged with landuse=farmland? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 17:28, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm not certain if it's a good idea, but certainly there are areas of farmland that are intentionally left fallow for one year out of every 3 or 4 years, so I speculate that some mappers are often leaving this as landuse=farmland during the fallow year. And of course fields that are fallow every winter are routinely tagged as landuse=farmland. In other places, like here in eastern Indonesia, land will be planted with crops for a couple of years in a row, then left fallow for several years, while grasses, weeds and smalls shrubs grow back. Then these are cut down and burned, adding nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil. I've sometimes been tagging these long-term fallow areas as farmland, when they appear like they were recently used (you can still see the cultivated mounds used for sweet potatoes, not too much grass growin), or as landuse=meadow when they are completely overgrown with grasses and other plants, and then natural=scrub if shrubs and bushes have grown up to cover most of the area. But I see now that there is a tag fallow=yes used 2754 times (mainly in northern Italy). Perhaps I should start adding this tag to areas of farmland that appear to have been fallow for more than a few months.

crop=grape

What is the point of tagging crop=grape on landuse=vineyard? What else can be a crop at vineyard? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 09:44, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

Not much point. 99% of the values of crop=* with landuse=vineyard are grape, so it seems redundant. I'm not sure why this became popular in 2017 and kept climbing steadily (on taghistory), but it's now used all over the globe according to taginfo map.

Request for comments

There are a bunch of tag combinations which should better be done with tree=, produce= or derive from imports. What about moving all these entries to a separate table or even completely remove them?--Constantino (talk) 23:33, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

Which ones do you mean in particular? This page is trying to document how the key is actually used, so these values are mentioned because they are quite common, even though in some cases trees=* or produce=* are more common. --Jeisenbe (talk) 02:04, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Short rotation forestry (fast_growing_wood)

I would recommend using produce=wood or produce=fast_growing_wood rather than crop=fast_growing_wood for coppicing and other types of short-rotation forestry used to produce fuelwood ("biomass"), since a coppice still grows into shrubs and then 3.5 to 5 meter tall trees prior to being cut, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_rotation_forestry - this would be landuse=forest (perhaps + natural=scrub if the trees are still small), rather than landuse=farmland, and fuelwood is not normaly considered a "crop" in English, since it is neither food nor an annual produce: generally crop plants are annuals which produce food. --Jeisenbe (talk) 00:18, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

@Jeisenbe, thanks for your feedback. I am aware that "crop" strictly speaking does not fit exactly. However, many definitions are used in the OSM-wiki "cum grano salis". Just realised that according to taginfo crop=fast_growing_wood is already >1200 times in use. I also understand the objection forest vs farmland, because short rotation plantation is a modern form of historical coppice use. But at least in Germany, short rotation coppice plantations with a rotation period of less than 20 years are legally speaking not forests, but retain the status of agricultural land. Not sure whether this is regulated uniformly in the EU, probably more or less ;-) That said we might merge crop=short_rotation_forestry into crop=fast_growing_wood. If you agree, I would be happy if you could edit this suggestion in the wiki. --geow (talk) 09:52, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes, if you really want to use the crop=* key for this, I would use crop=fast_growing_wood since it is already in use, and the value describes the name of the "crop." But in English we really wouldn't talk about forestry products as crops, since those are annual plants grown on farmland (cropland). No matter how a certain government defines something, in Openstreetmap we are trying to map reality in a way which will make sense to a global audience. So if the land is covered with small trees and is used for fuelwood, that's landuse=forest, natural=wood, or perhaps natural=scrub if the "trees" are small bushes still. And if you check out produce=* it's clear that most mappers use that key for things like wood, timber and other forestry products, so it makes sense to stick with the more common key. --Jeisenbe (talk) 11:49, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree with you that the classification forestry vs. farmland should primarily be done on site by experienced people. But not all areas planted with trees are automatically forest, e.g. think of an orchard. As mentioned above, the classification of an area as utilised forest also depends on the national agricultural and forestry legislation and should be taken into account accordingly. I personally wouldn't combine natural=wood/scrub with managed land like crop/produce=fast_growing_wood. I can understand your technical reasoning for produce=fast_growing_wood. However, since 2014 there are more than 1200 instances of crop=fast_growing_wood, see https://taghistory.raifer.tech/#***/crop/fast_growing_wood So I tend to document the established tagging to prevent tag fragmentation.--geow (talk) 17:29, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Re: "depends on the national agricultural and forestry legislation". I diagree. The way we map in Openstreetmap does not depend on legislation. If your government decides to reclassify all coppices as forestry rather than agriculture, that should not change the way we map. Rather, we tag what is there: landuse=orchard is used for plantations of trees, bushes and similar perenial plants which are used to produce mainly food (including coffee, tea and palm oil, in addition to the usual fruits and nuts), while landuse=forest (or natural=wood depending on your preference) is used for areas of trees when they are used for fuelwood, timber, lumber, and similar forestry products - not food.

Re: "I tend to document the established tagging to prevent tag fragmentation." I agree, but note that produce=wood is more common, with over 3800 uses: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/produce=wood. --Jeisenbe (talk)

"depends on the national agricultural and forestry legislation" +1, binding tagging to legislation is generally a bad idea, for multiple reasons. Legislation may easily change, will be drastically different across world, may be absurd. We are doing it only in cases of mapping something directly resulting from laws - like maxspeed=*. We will not tag field of strawberries as orchard, even if in some location government classified strawberries as trees. Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 18:24, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Would you believe that trees=strawberry_plants has been used 7 times?! https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/trees=strawberry_plants - but crop=strawberry is much more common - https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/crop=strawberry --Jeisenbe (talk) 23:23, 9 March 2020 (UTC)