Ever Google Earth your place? treehuggers--Run!

[greybeard]

To get a satellite shot of your place, you can either go to google, type in the nearest city or your zip code, and a map will pop up off to the right of the links. Click on the map, and a full page of that map will load, with an option up in the right hand corner to see a sat shot. If you don't have the google earth plugin, it will prompt you to download and install it--pretty small file and takes about 4 minutes (except on dialup). You can do the same thru mapquest, except you don't need a plugin tho their images aren't as up to date and the resolution on zoom isn't too great.
Here's a combination of my place over the years. (the buildings show up as white globs because of the angle and light reflected back off the metal roofs.) I'll get another zoomed in later, and you can even see those charolais out in the pasture.
(treehuggers-close your eyes--this is gonna hurt.)
I think this was around 2004--and may have been an old terraserver or mapquest pic--my pond and the area around it before I did anything to it. blk square on upper left is where my house is now.

2009--had begun clearing and the new house was just dried in--now yard or outbuildings.

2010 I think.

About the same timeframe, zoomed in on the eastern part. I had started burning the brushpiles and had to stop for burn bans.

Dec 2012--I know December because I had already started feeding hay near the loafing shed just North of the house and yard. an't tell it in this pic, but I'm out there on a tractor in front of that shed.

 

[greybeard]

Look close and you can see the white cattle:

Just left of upper center, there is a shed, a tractor, a hayring and 2 or 3 beefmasters.

Lost lots of grass during the 2011-2012 droughts.

 

[sim.-ang.king]

Like my dad says, "the worlds got plenty of trees, it will live with one less." :nod:
Very interesting pictures.

 

[heath]

Had you saved the older pictures or is there a place online that saves them?

 

[Caustic Burno]

Dang I can see my cows as well.

 

[cow pollinater]

We pay a suplemental tax on improvements here in CA. I spent an hour on the phone last year with some guy with a lisp and a hardon...okay, I'm making an assumption about the last part but he was REALLY excited about finding new taxes he could impose... but he had my ranch and all of my farm ground on google map and was asking me about specifics like why the road was darker where it went through the corrals as if I'd applied something to it to "improve"it . He even spotted some shredders that had cut prunings on my walnuts and were parked at the end of the orchard on the day pictures were taken. I told him they weren't mine and they actually sent someone out to look for those machines on my property. :mad: All in all what little they found did not raise my tax enough to pay for the guys wages for the hour. :mad:

 

[Jogeephus]

Its obvious you didn't play when clearing the land.

 

[cow pollinater]

Sorry greybeard, I got off on a rant and forgot to add my original reason to comment... That looks like a bunch of improvement. I can't even imagine clearing that much land. I also can't imagine having that much water on my place.

 

[Commercialfarmer]

Looks good. Is your ground pretty sandy?

 

[greybeard]

Had you saved the older pictures or is there a place online that saves them?

I saved a couple, and if you go to Mapquest, I guess they don't update regularly on their highest zoom photos--at least not in rural areas. When you zoom in max, it's an older photo--usually 2-3 years old. Google Earth tho updates about every 12-18 months.
The old free version of Terraserver that MSN used to host had some old ones but they are now a pay only business. I have one of those terraserver pics for about 1995 on another computer that I have in the closet--might dig it out sometime and snag the pics off it. This whole place looked just like the surrounding forest area back then except for about 9 acres.


It's been a fight and I'm poor boying it. Not a fence on it that would hold a cow in 2006--now it's all fenced and crossfenced.

 

[greybeard]

Looks good. Is your ground pretty sandy?

Can't tell it in the pics, but on the far right side, there's a little river (E Fork San Jacinto River) It's sandy about 200 ft from it, but all the rest is a clay type soil. Official name I think, is alluvial sedimentary clay. Laid down by many decades of that river overflowing and dropping sediment during flood stage. Pretty poor soil really--I need to lime it bad.

 

[Commercialfarmer]

Looks good. Is your ground pretty sandy?

Can't tell it in the pics, but on the far right side, there's a little river (E Fork San Jacinto River) It's sandy about 200 ft from it, but all the rest is a clay type soil. Official name I think, is alluvial sedimentary clay. Laid down by many decades of that river overflowing and dropping sediment during flood stage. Pretty poor soil really--I need to lime it bad.

Trying to make sense of the light tan areas. Pictures of our area would look similar, but the tan areas would be sand. We have pretty poor soil and then add in the dryness and it isn't good at all. We keep some cedars just so we have something green to look at. :D

 

[Caustic Burno]

GB went back and looked at mine and they must have took the pictures yesterday or the day before.
Hay count in a stack I am feeding out of is off by two.

 

[greybeard]

I knew they were recent CB, just not sure exactly. That was the only good thing about the old terraserver--it showed the month and year. It also had a topo option and plugged in an overlay of all the elevations according to USGS, and they were within a few inches of what my elevation survey showed when I had the house permitted.
One thing I did notice about Google tho, is adresses. It shows "approximate" addresses, and in my case, was way way off.
If you enable 'labels', it will show roads, and in some cases, roads that are no longer there--I suppose from older maps or county records.

If someone doesn't know how to find their place on a sat map, just start in the nearest town with about a medium zoom, enable labels (road names and numbers) and just "drive" out to home with the cursor or navigation circle on the left..

 

[heath]

On google earth you can go back to 1995. The pictures arent the clearest though.

 

[greybeard]

On google earth you can go back to 1995. The pictures arent the clearest though.

How do you get to previous years? Be easier for me to do that than dig that old 486 computer out of the closet.

 

[sim.-ang.king]

press the 1998 button, or what ever the date is.

 

[Ouachita]

Greybeard,
On google, at the top of the screen view, there is kinduv a tool bar. One of them is a green circular arrow. When you move your cursor over it, it will say something like "show historical imagery". When you click on that a slide bar box will pop up and you can select multiple image dates.
Mine goes back to 1994. In the lower left of the main screen view it will tell you what the source of the imagery is. Most of the earlier images are not sat views, but are SCS aerial views.
The progress on my place is much like yours. The 1994 image is all timber. The next image is 2001 and shows my pond amongst the timber and my house. The next several show a progressive clearing of land for grass. It is interesting.
I dont know how to copy/save a screen shot to post here. I know I could copy/paste the link, but I don't want everybody here to have my geo coordinates.

 

[greybeard]

Ouachita
I did a screenshot without the street/road labels. Then pasted just the shot into Paint, cropped and resized it, saved each image to my pictures. Then upload them to my image host--Imageshack in my case--others use photobucket.