Evaluating a New Field

O.L.D. McDonald just bought a farm. And on this farm he will grow corn and soybeans. He is interested in installing a farm pond that will be used as the outlet and water source for a combined drainage/subirrigation system.

The main goal of this exercise is to determine the storage volume of the pond that will be constructed at the western end of the field for which data are supplied. However, the exercise will also serve to introduce or review several useful tools, including SURFER and EXCEL.

You are provided with two files, an EXCEL file with topographic information for the field, and an ASCII file with the field boundary.

  1. Extract the latitude, longitude and elevation of every fifth point in the EXCEL file and store this information in a new file.
  1. Determine the minimum latitude and longitude of the points that you have selected.
  1. Using the average values determined above as the origin, convert the lat/long data into Cartesian data.
  1. Convert the boundary file into Cartesian coordinates using the same origin as used above.
  1. Import the data into SURFER and create a regular grid using either the kriging or inverse distance interpolation methods.
  1. Superimpose the boundary file over the grid, blanking out the points that are outside of the boundary. Do not overwrite the grid created at each step. Create new grids as needed.
  1. Create a contour map of the field, using 1.5 ft contour intervals. Set all elevations lower than 716.5 ft to one color.
  1. Calculate the area of the field
  1. The section of the field at the western edge below the 716.5 ft contour is to be made into a pond. Use the on-screen digitizer to blank out other low areas, and thereby determine the area of the field that will be taken out of production.
  1. Determine the maximum volume of water that can be stored in the pond without excavation.
  1. How deep would the pond have to be to store enough water to apply 2 inches and 3.5 inches of water to the entire field? What volume of earth that would need to be excavated?
  1. Locate the field on the Web Soil Survey. Determine the area of each soil type.