Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program

The Montgomery County, Maryland Department of Technology and Enterprise Business Solutions - Geographic Information Systems (TEBS-GIS) team, in cooperation with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), developed an ArcView GIS-based Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP) application. The application provides the Montgomery County Soil Conservation District (SCD) the means to save a significant amount of time and makes the task of targeting eligible farms for CREP funding and marketing the CREP program to the farmland owners more efficient. The CREP application provides the ability to select the target farm by address or geographic location. In doing so, the application will start to process and analyze factors based on the geographical data associated with the target property, such as streams, wetlands, and soil rental rates. SCD staff need only click a button and then choose a property to obtain the attributes of the target property to realize if this property is a candidate for the CREP program. The geographic data presented in the CREP application reflects information downloaded daily, weekly, or quarterly by TEBS-GIS.