Better information on cropland will be at the fingertips of farmers across the country, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture has updated its online geospatial exploring tool, CropScape. This National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) news release says CropScape has added Cropland Data Layers from crop year 2013 that gives the public an easy access to interactive data, without having to download specialized software.

These new Cropland Data Layer products, which are derived from satellite image observations at 30-meter (0.22 acres per pixel) resolution, help users visualize U. S. crop planted area during the last calendar year. Three earth observing satellites were used for the production of this product, including; the newly launched Landsat 8, and Disaster Monitoring Constellation’s Deimos-1 and UK2.

NASS developed CropScape in cooperation with the Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

You can check out the online tool here.