In order to meet North Dakota’s new state-mandated agricultural assessment standards, Grand Forks County, North Dakota, has selected The Sidwell Company to provide professional GIS services to aid the jurisdiction’s assessment officials in the task of efficiently calculating soils valuations for agricultural tax parcels.  The company will prepare existing soils files for use in performing countywide soils computations on agricultural parcels and assist Grand Forks County in arriving at assessed valuations by employing Sidwell’s Farmland Assessment and Report Management System (FARMS™). One distinctive advantage of this ArcGIS®-compliant software solution for agricultural tax assessment is the ease with which the generated data can be exported to various formats for the purposes of complete system integration.  Additional features of the software module include being able to set up user-defined tolerances for easily identifying discrepancies between assessed and measured acreages, the ability to then “normalize” these acreage discrepancies, and the capabilities to create customized thematic maps for presentation, set spot symbol placements and record related comments for each parcel.  The county will also receive a customized enhancement to the FARMS module, which will be developed by modifying the overlay and reporting functions of the base FARMS application to enable creation of an additional, distinct modifier layer that is unique to North Dakota farmland assessment. In addition, Sidwell will provide to Grand Forks County on-site, specialized training that focuses on the use of the FARMS™ software extension within ArcGIS® 9.3, covering basic operations for processing agricultural parcels, all processing tools and reporting features of the system, and the different user customizations that are available within the reporting application.  To help control implementation costs for this project, Sidwell will install the FARMS™ software remotely and follow up with further on-site configuration of the module.
 
Traill County, ND also recently selected Sidwell to provide similar agricultural assessments, soils computations, and FARMS installation and training services.  Other North Dakota counties that have previously chosen the company’s agricultural assessment solution include, Eddy, Foster, Kidder, Ramsey and Towner.  Sidwell continues to work closely with local assessment officials to ensure that all formulas, calculations and reports generated by the FARMS software remain compliant with agricultural assessment standards set by the state of North Dakota.