June 06, 2008 -- St. Charles, IL – The Sidwell Company is providing digital agricultural parcel file development services to Eddy County, North Dakota, to aid the jurisdiction’s assessment officials in efficiently calculating soils valuations for agricultural parcels to meet new state-mandated agricultural assessment standards. Specifically, Sidwell is developing a digital GIS parcel file for all of the county’s agricultural parcels, along with the soils map layer, Common Land Unit modifier layer, and associated attribute tables. Soils computations services will then be performed using Sidwell’s Farmland Assessment and Report Management System (FARMS™)—an ESRI ArcGIS®-compliant software solution for agricultural assessments.

Additionally, Sidwell is providing shared on-site training in a centralized location to Eddy County, along with the North Dakota counties of Foster, Kidder, Ramsey and Towner, who have also contracted for agricultural assessment services, to help defray the costs of this project component for each jurisdiction. The specialized training program will focus on the use of the FARMS™ software extension within ArcGIS® 9.2, covering basic operations for processing agricultural parcels, all processing and reporting tools in the system, and user customizations within the reporting application. Implementation of this project also includes the installation and configuration of FARMS™ at Eddy County for continued use and maintenance of the agricultural database.

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FARMS™ is a true GIS-based application developed by The Sidwell Company that is designed for use in the creation and analysis of datasets related to the process of agricultural real estate assessment. For more information about FARMS and Parcel Builder™ (Sidwell’s premier parcel mapping solution), or about the company’s GIS, aerial photography, photogrammetric and mapping services, call 877.SIDWELL (877.743-9355), or visit their websites at www.ParcelBuilder.com or www.sidwellco.com.

ESRI and ArcGIS 9.2 are licensed trademarks of ESRI. For more information about GIS industry leader ESRI, contact the company at 800.GIS.XPRT (800.447.9778) or visit them on the web at www.esri.com.