Terrace Farming on Agricultural Land in the Conterminous United States, 1992: National Resource Inventory Conservation Practice 600

This data set represents the estimated percentage of the 1-km grid cell that is covered by or subject to the agricultural conservation practice (CP600), Terrace Farming (TF) on agricultural land by county. Terrace Farming is described as "an earth embankment, or a combination ridge and channel, constructed across the field slope" ...[for the purpose of] reducing soil erosion and retaining runoff for moisture conservation. This practice also is applied where soil erosion by water is a problem or there is a need to conserve water." (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1995) This data set was created with geographic information systems (GIS) and database management tools. The acres on which TF's are applied were totaled at the county level in the tabular NRI database and then apportioned to a raster coverage of agricultural land within the county based on the Enhanced National Land Cover Dataset (NLCDe) 1-kilometer resolution land cover grids (Nakagaki, 2003). Federal land is not considered in this analysis because NRI does not record information on those lands.