Developing a national alfalfa information system

Selecting the "best" forage species or species mixture requires a knowledge and understanding of the consuming animal, soil characteristics, and forage species. The multivariate nature of the problem presents challenges to those interested in solving the practical problem of maximizing available resources. Earlier work at Cornell University resulted in a WWW-based interface that allowed the user to provide a soil type or zip code and additional management factors to initiate the species selection. This approach relies on either user knowledge of soil series or an implied relationship between zip code and soil series that may often be wrong. To improve this management tool, we have developed a working WWW-based map interface that allows the user to move to near field-scale: where a "click" will link the map location to underlying soil series information (series id, drainage and slope classes). This information is then passed to the decision support component of the system where the species selection process occurs. This map-based approach takes advantage of the inherent spatial nature of the forage selection problem.