New York State Agriculture in Relation to Aquifers

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     The map I created on ArcGIS Online is an interactive map showing the relationship between agriculture in New York State and the presence of aquifers under the surface in New York State.
The data I used for the map was a combination of two different sources. One layer was the USDA croplands survey from 2009 and the other was a map of underground aquifers in New York State which I found and uploaded onto Moodle from the NYS GIS Clearinghouse website.
      Some agricultural patterns seen on the map include the band between Albany and Buffalo, where the Erie Canal is located, that is rich in crops compared to the rest of the state and to the rest of the Northeast in general. Two specific regions which stick out for agricultural production are the Finger Lakes and the area on the shores of Lake Ontario around Rochester. Another visible pattern, which may be inadvertent, is the location of major cities being on or near an aquifer including Albany, Binghamton, Oswego, Schenectady, Syracuse, Rochester, Jamestown and Elmira. The reason this is inadvertent is because in the Midwest and the Great Plains, farm towns were established near an available source of ground water because irrigation was needed. And so, unlike in New York State where water is more abundant and the need for aquifers is less, these cities had to be built on aquifers and Upstate New York cities did not. When corresponding to each other, the location of aquifers does not seem to affect the location of major agricultural areas at all, and so the relationship between the two, unlike in the rest of the country, is very much irrelevant; interesting in these days of mass-agriculture and water crises. Another pattern visible on a map, even without contours, is that most agriculture in New York State is converged on certain bands; mainly along the Mohawk Valley, the St. Lawrence Valley, the Lake Ontario Lowlands, the Upper Hudson Valley and the Finger Lakes.  This shows that all major agriculture production in the state is centered on a body of water and that there is virtually no crop farming in most of the state including the areas of the Adirondacks, the Appalachians and the cities and suburbs of the state from Buffalo to the Tri-Cities and from Westchester to Long Islands, although, eastern Long Island in Suffolk County actually has some of the greatest agricultural output in terms of revenue in the state.
     There are many reasons as to why these patterns are the way they are. The soils that lie within New York State are a very important factor when it comes to determining where agriculture is located. Waterways were also extremely important originally to the growth of agriculture upstate. In places like the Mohawk, Hudson, St. Lawrence and Champlain Valleys, agriculture was widespread back in the time of the creation of the Erie Canal as well as nowadays. Today, though, cities and suburbs play an important role in determining where agriculture is located. The Finger Lakes and Lake Ontario also play vital roles in the agricultural industry in New York State; this is the area of the most non-dairy product in the state, mainly fruits used in wine production. As said before, the fact that aquifers do not play a major role at all in the proliferation of croplands in New York State is interesting. When one looks at the very heart of New York State, the Erie Canal and the NYS Thruway, one can see a pattern where croplands and aquifers also tend to flow along these highways, perhaps showing a natural pattern that growth must run along a straight line from Albany to Buffalo. Also, there being no aquifers in the Adirondack Park is interesting, although, there are mostly no topsoil on top of the rocks that are the Adirondack Mountains, and so this fact becomes less alarming. Perhaps all of these factors play a part as to why the Adirondacks are not suitable to farming at all.