St. Charles, IL – Washington County, Arkansas is located in the northwestern part of the state and centers around Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks. Although the County has a well-established and robust GIS in place to support the needs of the County assessment operations, they were in search of a more efficient means by which to calculate soils valuations for their agricultural tax parcels. They also knew that their existing data set would require enhancements and updates in order to ensure that it contained all necessary information required for accurate calculation of their ag parcel values. Washington County chose The Sidwell Company to provide GIS data enhancements and a GIS-based agricultural assessment solution to meet these needs.

For this project, Sidwell’s team will review and update all existing agricultural land use data to ensure that it fits to current aerial imagery, with special attention being given to locating the approximately 8,000 home sites across the county and updating the areas of forest cover. This enhanced agricultural land use data will support the parcel/soils acreage calculations that will be performed using Sidwell’s Farmland Assessment and Report Management System (FARMS®) software. One distinctive advantage of this ArcGIS®-compliant software solution for agricultural tax assessment is the ease with which the enhanced data can be processed to generate accurate and completed acreage calculations and operate within their existing GIS software environment. The resultant acreage calculations can be exported to various formats for the purposes of complete system integration. Additional features of the software module include the ability to set up user-defined tolerances for easily identifying discrepancies between assessed and measured acreages, the ability to then “normalize” these acreage discrepancies, and the capabilities to create customized thematic maps for presentation, set spot symbol placements and record related comments for each parcel. Final delivery of Washington County’s enhanced GIS data will be made in ESRI’s Geodatabase format.

Washington County joins the more than 100-strong family of local government users of Sidwell’s robust and efficient farmland assessment software solution. The County will realize benefit in the enhancement of their data set, consistency in their acreage calculations and the efficiencies in agricultural assessment valuation provided by the FARMS product.

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About Sidwell
For over 80 years, The Sidwell Company has provided outstanding products and services, evolving and innovating every step of the way. Sidwell is an employee-owned firm providing integrated land records management solutions and GIS mapping and software development to local government and private-sector organizations across the United States. Sidwell’s premier parcel mapping solution, Parcel Builder™, is currently used by over 150 customers nationwide. Sidwell also offers a full range of aerial photography and photogrammetric services, and is the Midwest Distributor for Ashtech (formerly Magellan™) GPS products and solutions. For more information about Sidwell services and products, call 877.SIDWELL (877.743.9355) or visit www.sidwellco.com.