Agricultural chemicals use data access using coldfusion markup language and a relational database

A relational database was developed for the agricultural chemical use data collected by the US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service since 1990. coldfusion Markup Language was used for the client-side interface and server side process programming. The database is accessible from the Web at URL: http://www.pestmanagement.info/nass. Users can obtain information about agricultural chemical use in the database by search of crop, year, region, and active ingredient. Various agricultural chemical usage statistics are provided as Web tables, dynamically generated US maps, charts and graphs, and downloadable Excel files. We used a centralized software architecture in this project, which is suitable for projects with moderate programming complexity. A distributed approach might be more appropriate for the more complex projects. The current database information, spanning 1990-2001, will be augmented in the future, possibly using an automated updating scheme.