Need a quick Census TIGER/Line Shapefile for a map you are making? 🗺

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Need a quick Census TIGER/Line Shapefile for a map you are making? 🗺

It is super easy to get using R and tigris and sf libraries. I often will run a command like this in R terminal to get a Shapefile of the of the counties in Maine.

library(sf)
library(tigris)

counties(‘me’, cb=T) %>% write_sf(‘/tmp/maine.shp’)

Other common tigris functions I will use is state, county_subdivision, tract, block_group and school_districts which work similarly. A resolution parameter can be supplied to control the resolution downloaded, the cb=T flag obtains cartographic boundaries which follow coast lines, rather then actual boundaries.

Unbroken Natural Lands (Forest, Farmland) Over 10k Acres In New York

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While more then 3/5th of the landmass in New York State is forested and roughly a quarter is farmed, many of the parcels are broken up by roads and houses. Even small gaps in natural cover can have significant impacts on wildlife. Most of state's largest parcels of unbroken cover is in the Adirondacks, though a few large parcels can be found in the Catskills and Allegany hills of Western NY. This data set also contains some data from watersheds in Northern Pennsylvania that feed into New York. From the New York Natural Heritage Program:

Although forests in the Northeastern US had been increasing in their extent since the early 1900s, more recently, we are starting to see this trend reverse,with development fragmenting and reducing the size of forests on our landscape. The objective of this project was to delineate road-less forest patches throughout New York State, based on the latest version of the National Land Cover Dataset(2016), and then to assess the condition of those patches within the Hudson River Estuary Watershed.

Data Source: New York Natural Heritage Program, New York Forest Patches, Natural Lands.

5 Things I Learned the Hard Way While Raising Pigs – Modern Farmer

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5 Things I Learned the Hard Way While Raising Pigs – Modern Farmer

My farm vet dissuaded me from purchasing a boar to start my herd by sharing horror stories about their razor sharp tusks and unpredictable nature. He said he’d personally rescued a guy from being trampled to death by an angry boar. So I decided to start with a sow. A pregnant sow. Ms. Piggie, as I named her, was a chocolate brown duroc-Yorkshire mix, with a mane of black hair running down her back. She was beautiful, all 350 pounds of her. This may sound strange, but I think pigs have the most human-like face of any animal – if you discount the snout and focus on the eyes, you’ll see what I mean. Ms. Piggie had these incredible eyelashes, just like Jim Henson’s muppet. The economics sounded promising: Pigs average about 10 babies per litter, so for the price of a few weaners I would end up with 10 pigs, plus a mama that I could breed again the next year, and the next, and the next. As with my goats, I would just rent a boar when the time came. That day never arrived, however, as my time as a pig farmer lasted just one stressful year. Here’s a few of the lessons I learned along the way.