How to use Google Earth to map your farms permaculture zones

Hi everyone

I have developed a step-by-step guide on how you can use the free Google Earth program to map permaculture zones on your farm

Here it is :

http://www.almostafarmer.com/using-google-earth-to-zone-your-farm/

I hope you find this a useful tool in planning your homestead or farm (or even backyard!)

Cheers

Gaz
www.almostafarmer.com

Thank you so much! I will definitely be getting some mileage out of this.

Edit: I will post my results here when I map my properties.

You are very welcome Jonah. I have used Google Earth for other applications - and it was great to finally use it to map my own farm

I would love to see other peoples farms mapped using the tool....

I prefer Apple Maps because I find the level of detail and definition to be surprisingly higher than Google Earth. The 3D is really, really good too. It doesn't do terrain or many different overlay options but I think it's worth checking out if you have iOS

Interesting idea. I will give it a shot as I love maps in general and Google Earth is quite a bit of fun. A site that I found to be indispensable when using Google Earth is this: http://www.earthpoint.us/shapes.aspx which lets you calculate the area of shapes made in Google Earth. Checking it against a known area shows it to be quite accurate.

Yes! Thank you this really helps a luddite like me navigate these newfangled tools. Very helpful.

I used satellite images in Windows quite extensively to lay out our property, mainly to plot boundary lines, streams, fire roads and trails. To get higher resolution image maps I would zoom in to maximum resolution, take a screen shot and paste into an old version (7) of Photoshop and then match up each screenshot so the pixels matched exactly. The I overlaid terrain (Topo maps) and platt lines lifted from Google Maps to try to plot the boundaries as close as possible. Viewing in Photoshop allowed me to adjust layers so that I could make various features more or less visible pepending on what I was planning.

Later I found that Bing Maps had an aerial photography feature that was much more detailed view that I again stitched together to achieve a large, detailed layout of our place. Bing Maps appears to have eleiminated the detailed aerial views and has not updated their satellite views in a while for our area, so its usefulness has diminished I think.

Google Earth Pro became free a few years ago and at first included boundary lines, at least for my area of the Lower Adirondacks, but they dropped that feature for some reason. I mostly use Google Earth Pro these days on an iPad Pro that lacks many of the advanced features of the Windows version, but does allow for measuring and delineating areas on maps. One feature I miss in the iOS version is the availability of past satellite views that I found very useful. One aspect of doing planning and research via satellite images is the time of year and time of day can be useful. For example the most recent GE image of our property, updated in early 2017, Was taken in Fall, so color in the deciduous trees helps differentiate them from the fir and spruce.  An older image available in Windows was taken in the late winter, so is more useful locating streams, trails and terrain not easily seen in views where the trees are fully leafed out.

We also found an archive of old aerial images of our area that Skidmore College has online. One from the forties was especially useful as it was annotated with wetlands, an old pond (the dam still exists) and of course the extent of clearing at that time.

I'll post some images in this thread comparing my research when I can get a chance.