Month: April 2023

Since the last update, more development work has been done. One thing I did was create the table on the individual farm page to showcase comparable information. This includes the current and original owners, acreage, crops, and livestock. This was implemented because of feedback from the project sponsor. I also moved the image to the left of the “general farm information” to make the page look better. Originally, this was at the top of the page. Lastly, on this page, I added a default picture that loads for farms that don’t have any pictures in the database. This picture is in the screenshot below.

Another thing I did was update the climate data for the climate graphs. I got an email from ClimateNA (which is where we source the climate information) stating that data for 2022 was available. Because of this, I needed to move the year 2022 from the future climate graphs to the historic climate graphs and update the data. I also needed to add climate data for the farms I added to the database a couple weeks ago. During our meeting last Thursday with the project sponsor, I learned that ClimateNA actually has an API we could use instead of of downloading the csv files and managing the data ourselves. The project sponsor knows the creator of the ClimateNA API so I was able to email him some questions about the API. I want to know things like “is there a limit on API calls?” and “is there a way to write one API call to get data for a set of years?” (looking through the API documentation, it didn’t seem like there was a way to do this, but it would make things a lot more easier). I am still waiting on a response from the creator of the API, but am hopeful we will be able to switch to the API to make managing the data easier.

Since my last capstone update, some more development on the project has been done and we got good feedback at the end of last term from our project sponsor about what should be changed in the features we had done so far.

The Feedback We Got

• Combine the historic and current data tab into one tab that makes it easier to compare data from the past and current – we will be adding a table that compares data fields that are comparable
• Some farms have a synopsis available. These should be included on the individual farm page tab that shows all of the farm data
• Remove the data fields “acreage farmed today”, “generations on farm”, “legal description”, “year of award”, and “ethnic origin” because they are not needed or are implied by other data fields we are keeping
• Customize the marker color and the text of the farms that have been interviewed by Mariah, who is a graduate student doing her thesis on Century Farms
• To the filter feature on the main screen add filters to search farms by whether or not they have: animals on the farm, any tree that produces a crop, and any shrubs that produces a crop

The Development I’ve Done Since Then

Near the end of last term, I finished the climate graphs. The historic climate graphs (1920-2021 and future climate graphs (2021-2050) are on separate tabs of the individual farm page. Each page has precipitation and temperature graphs. An evapotranspiration graph will be added for each page.

This over spring break and during the term I combined all the data on the current data tab and the historic data tab. I have not yet made a table for the data, but I’m sure the table will be easy to do. During this term, I have worked on getting data into the database for the farms Mariah has interviewed. Mariah sent us a document that has a list of all of the interviewed farms, which is eight farms right now, but there will be more by the end of the term. Some of these farms were not in our current database, so I added the ones that weren’t already added. For all of the farms I added a data field that states whether or not the farm has been interviewed. This information will help my teammate implement the feedback we got from our sponsor about having the farm markers and farm text a different color for the farms that have been interviewed.

This term I have also separated the graph tab code into separate files because originally, all of the code for the individual farm page was in one file and it was getting very long and hard to follow. The file main individual farm page file went from 843 lines to 386 and two files were added for the graphs with each of them being 145 lines. This makes the codebase a lot easier to follow.