College of Agriculture and Life Sciences by Kyle Dornich. 

A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a tool that creates visual representations of data and performs spatial analyses in order to make informed decisions. It is a technology that combines hardware, software, and data. The data can represent almost anything imaginable so long as it has a geographic component. The hardware can be anything from a desktop computer or laptop to satellites, drones, and handheld GPS units. There are a few different software packages, but ESRI’s ArcGIS suite is the industry standard. The public, private, and non-profit sectors all employ GIS to do everything from managing public utilities to organize the movement and dispersion of goods and services. GIS is very functional in traditional map making, to plot things like fire hydrants along a road, or to draw boundaries, like the area of different crop fields on a farm.

The real power of GIS, though, lies in its ability to analyze multiple data layers or variables. Simple examples of this within the realm of agriculture would be; a map showing the number of farm injuries by county, or the number of crop acres lost to flood by tax map parcel. The polygons representing different ownership or municipalities can convey the change in values in different ways, the most common being a changing color ramp.

More complex spatial analyses for agriculture might compare variables like soil type, wind direction, rainfall amount, slope, aspect, topography, or elevation to assist with crop management, site suitability, and drainage planning, as well as risk prevention from flood, drought, erosion, and disease. GIS can help a farmer adapt to these different variables, monitor the health of individual crops, estimate yields from a given field, and maximize crop production.

Visit the https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2017/04/use-of-gis/ for more information.