Extension: Field blocks vs. Crop Fields

[m-mohr]

It would be useful to identify what the primary "usecase" of the field boundary is.
Is the boundary part of a dataset that describes e.g. field blocks or crop fields?

PS: I hope I understood this correctly @ivorbosloper

[UpstatePedro]

Throwing in my 2 cents...
I think this will be an important one in order to make datasets interoperable and suitable for use in precision agriculture.

To motivate that point, I'll highlight a few different types of parcel boundary that might apply to the same piece of land over the course of several years:

1. Something akin to a cadastral parcel which defines a contiguous area of land that could be cropped with a single crop. The boundary might be defined by legal ownership, or by physical features like fences, hedges, ditches etc.
2. However, the boundary of an area that is growing the same crop at the same time might only be a subset of the boundary defined in (1) because the farmer doesn't plant the headland or he plants two different crops in that area, or he plants the same crop (different variety?) at different times.
3. If the crop is harvested at different times, then the boundaries created by farm machinery for each harvest operation would again be different to 1) & 2)

I may be off with some of the details, but I do think it's true to say that agriculture uses different parcel boundaries for different use cases. Having some way to communicate what a dataset of fiboa boundaries actually represents will be useful. The hard part is knowing what set of classifications would make sense to include in the extension.
I'm afraid I'm not the right person to suggest those; I just wanted to add a +1 for the idea behind this extension!

[ivorbosloper]

There is no limited set of parcel boundary use cases. Regulations can come with their own definition of field boundary. Or a specific (autonomous) vehicle/implement can require a specific field boundary definition method. The devil is always in the details. But we could probably come up with a list of known purposes, and indeed, crop field vs field block is a coarse grained classification....