AgCAAD

The Agriculture Crop Adaptation Atlas and Database (AgCAAD) is used to rate the suitability of Alberta agricultural land for annual crop production from weather and soil information. The AgCAAD model evaluates crop suitability across Alberta townships using climate heat supply, moisture supply, soil physical conditions, soil chemical conditions, and drainage.

For more details, see AgCAAD model description.

Model Components

AgCAAD evaluates crop suitability from these component groups:

• Climate heat supply: growing season length, winter cold tolerance, and temperature suitability.
• Climate moisture supply: annual precipitation suitability.
• Soil physical conditions: soil texture.
• Soil chemical conditions: soil pH.
• Soil drainage: drainage class suitability.

High Performance Parallel Computing

AgCAAD distributes computations across township grids and crops. The optional --threads argument defaults to 1. Use --threads auto to use the available CPU cores, or provide a positive integer to set the worker count.

Interactive Web Application

AgCAAD Explorer lets you explore crop suitability maps, and generate suitability assessments through a modern web interface.

Download

Prebuilt binaries are available from the v1.2.0 release.

The example input dataset is available separately as agcaad-examples.zip.

Choose the archive for your operating system and CPU:

Operating system	CPU	Download
Windows	Intel/AMD 64-bit	agcaad-x86_64-windows.zip
Windows	ARM64	agcaad-aarch64-windows.zip
Linux	Intel/AMD 64-bit	agcaad-x86_64-linux.zip
Linux	ARM64	agcaad-aarch64-linux.zip
macOS	Intel 64-bit	agcaad-x86_64-macos.zip
macOS	Apple Silicon	agcaad-aarch64-macos.zip

Run With A Binary

Download and extract the archive for your system. The full model reads all required flat input files from a user-defined input folder and writes only the final ratings file to a user-defined output folder. Pass the input and output folders as named arguments. The optional --threads argument defaults to 1; use --threads auto to use the available logical CPU cores, or provide a positive integer. AgCAAD creates the output folder when needed.

Windows PowerShell:

.\agcaad.exe --input <input-root> --output <output-root> [--threads <auto|number>]

Linux/macOS shell:

chmod 'u+x' agcaad
./agcaad --input <input-root> --output <output-root> [--threads <auto|number>]

If --threads is omitted, the model runs with one worker thread. For example:

.\agcaad.exe --input <input-root> --output <output-root>

Windows example after downloading and extracting agcaad-examples.zip:

.\agcaad.exe --input "examples\agcaad_historical_weather_1981_2010\input" --output "examples\agcaad_historical_weather_1981_2010\output" --threads auto

On Linux and macOS, use ./agcaad instead of .\agcaad.exe.

The final output is:

crop_suitability_rankings_and_overall_ratings.txt

Input Files

After extracting agcaad-examples.zip, the example dataset has this layout:

agcaad_historical_weather_1981_2010/
  input/
    crop_suitability_requirements.txt
    historical_annual_precipitation_normals_by_township.txt
    historical_daily_temperature_normals_by_township.txt
    historical_hourly_temperature_by_township_day_hour.txt
    historical_winter_critical_temperature_by_township.txt
    soil_component_properties_by_township.txt
    soil_drainage_requirement_scores.txt
    soil_texture_requirement_scores.txt

Temperature-suitability growing days are calculated for all crops from the daily temperature normals; no precomputed crop-day files are required. Input folders should contain only the input .txt files. Nested input folders are not used.

Output Columns

The full run writes one tab-delimited file with these columns:

• crop_common_name
• township_id
• winter_cold_tolerance_score
• precipitation_suitability_score
• growing_season_suitability_score
• soil_drainage_suitability_score
• soil_ph_suitability_score
• soil_texture_suitability_score
• temperature_suitability_score
• overall_suitability_score
• overall_suitability_rating
• limitation_notes

Suitability Classes

Score range	Rating
< 0.5	Unsuitable
0.5-1.49	Slightly Suitable
1.5-2.49	Moderately Suitable
2.5-3.49	Suitable
>= 3.5	Highly Suitable

Repository Layout

src/
  agcaad.zig
  core/
    array_store.zig
    math.zig
    packed_key.zig
  io/
    delimited_reader.zig
    streaming_line_reader.zig
    tab_writer.zig
  soil/
    drainage.zig
    ph.zig
    texture.zig
  climate/
    growing_season.zig
    precip_suitability.zig
    temperature_suitability.zig
    winter_cold.zig
  suitability/
    final_rating.zig

Build From Source

Source builds require Zig 0.16.0.

zig build

Build optimized binaries for all supported platforms:

$targets = @('agcaad-x86_64-windows','agcaad-aarch64-windows','agcaad-x86_64-linux','agcaad-aarch64-linux','agcaad-x86_64-macos','agcaad-aarch64-macos')
foreach ($target in $targets) {
    zig build "-Dtarget=$target" -Doptimize=ReleaseFast -p "dst\$target"
}

The resulting binaries are written under dst/<target>/bin/.

Run tests:

zig build test

Run from source:

zig build run -- --input <input-root> --output <output-root> --threads auto