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Design Basics
Design Basics

Farm designs in Overyield are composed of two primary building blocks: Sections and Layers.

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Written by Support
Updated over 2 years ago

🎨 Design Page

When you enter a farm project, you’ll land on your Design Page — the creative center of Overyield, where you can flexibly envision and re-envision your farm landscape.

What is a section?

🌲 A section is a distinct planting area.

A section can be a single straight row of trees or a large field drawn on contour, a monoculture or a polyculture, economically productive or simply ornamental. Sections include 3 different planting types: Lines, Grids, and Keylines.

Lines

  • Lines are crop rows.

  • A line can be straight, irregularly shaped, or even follow a contour, though the line tool works best for small or irregular plantings such as windbreaks, hedgerows, riparian areas, or living fences following a property boundary.

Grids

  • A grid is a planted field: a collection of straight crop rows that auto-populate a predefined field boundary.

  • Grids allow you to quickly create large plantings while maximizing the productive capacity of a given area. Grids work best when drawing large fields with straight rows.

Keylines

  • The keyline tool combines both grids and lines, allowing you to create irregular rows within a predefined field boundary.

  • The keyline tool is especially helpful for drawing contour-planted areas.

What is a layer?

🌐 A layer is a landscape feature or attribute.

Layers range from ponds to roads, headlands to ridges. Our gallery below shows how each layer type can be creatively employed in Overyield.

Suitability:

  • The Suitability layer is a heat map that indicates your land’s capacity to support different crops, as determined by 12 different soil and climate attributes sourced primarily through USGS and NRCS data.

  • Though no substitute for ground-truthing activities such as soil testing, the Suitability layer serves as a great starting point during the design process, helping you better understand your land while guiding on-the-ground analyses.

Contour:

  • Contour maps help you understand your land's slope, indicating areas of high and low erosion risk, runoff potential, and more.

Drawing Contour Maps in QGIS

Headlands

  • Headlands refer to the unplanted margins of your field.

  • Drawing headlands allows you to account for tractor turnaround, shade from adjacent forest, and other factors that might limit your design.

Access

  • The Access layer refers to roads, be they existing or planned.

Fences

Farm Boundary

Ponds & Buildings

Valleys & Ridges

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