Since SnapPlus 18 came out so soon after 17, the new features and fixes for 17 may still be of interest:

New Desktop Features

•Nutrient System Editor: Use the Nutrient System Editor to create a system or combination of nutrient sources that are used on a yearly basis for a crop. Once you create a system, you can add it to any cropping year and field throughout the database.You can also export the system so the applications can be imported into another farm database. The Nutrient System Editor also allows you to report split applications.

•Spreadable Acres Table: With the Spreadable Acres table on the field page, you can access and edit all the spreadable acres on your plan (after verification). The spreadable acres calculations are performed in SnapMaps, so you must connect to SnapMaps, download your uploaded farm, and import again in order to use them. For 590 planning, the table reports cropping, manure spreadable and winter spreadable acres; for WPDES-permitted farms, it also displays the spreadable acres for each SWQMA buffer strategy.

•Field Problems: Use this button to add gully or ephemeral channel problems you have in certain fields.These can be imported into Field problems from SnapMaps. A planner is required to report these according to the 590 standard. In previous versions, these were reported on the Farm Screen under the Concentrated Flow Channel Box.

•Copy Cropping Years: You can now copy crop rotation years and add them to years in the future for that particular field. This copies the crop information and optionally the nutrient, fertilizer, and lime applications as well. You may also create a rotation from the selected crop years and applications. These features are found under the Add/Copy/Delete Years button on the cropping screen.

•One-step documentation of spreader calibration: The Farm Screen now lets you select your calibration methods for the whole farm's equipment in one step to meet the 590 standard requirement.

•Create a group from grids: You can now create a group from the Fields and Cropping grids. Select multiple rows by clicking on the row header cells, right mouse click on a selected row header cell in the grid and enter the group name.

New SnapMaps Features

•New Map Feature Types: Draw or import manure prohibited areas and soil sample points

•Streamlined Deletion: Delete multiple features at once by simply drawing a polygon around them.

•Winter Spreading Maps: Produce these maps for both CAFO and non-CAFO farms.

•Choose Spatial Reference System for Shapefile Export: When exporting shapefiles, you can now select the spatial reference system (commonly called the "projection") to be used. SnapMaps supports Wisconsin Transverse Mercator (EPSG-3071), Web Mercator (EPSG-3857), UTM Zone 15, and UTM Zone 16.

•Filter Out Overlapping Features: When uploading various feature types (e.g. fields), ones that significantly overlap a feature already in the SnapMaps database for your farm will be rejected, so that overlapping features don't confuse the map.

•All-Feature Export: In addition to exporting each of the feature types individually, you can now export and backup all features into a single shapefile.

•Improved PDFs: PDF creation now takes less than 5 seconds. The PDF maps also look much better, and offer your choice of landscape or portrait layout.

New Features for Planning with the 2015 Nutrient Management Standard 590

•Restriction flagging and messages now follow the 2015 590 Standard.

•Guidance messages are a new category of messages that give guidance for meeting the 590 standard at the time of applications.

•The Winter Spreading Plan report allows planners to meet all of the winter application planning requirements of the 2015 standard.

New Features for Planning on WPDES Permitted Farms

•SWQMA strategy selection is automatic: For fields containing SWQMAs, the software will automatically determine whether a 25 ft or 100 ft manure prohibition zone is required.

•Spreadable acres used for manure calculation: Total manure applied is now calculated using only the acres where manure is allowed for that season of application. On fields with manure and manure prohibition zones, the nutrient balance shown on the cropping screen are for the area that receives manure – it does not include the extra fertilizer that is required for the manure-prohibition zones. The spreadable acres calculations are performed in SnapMaps, so you must connect to SnapMaps, download your uploaded farm, and import again in order to use them.

New Nutrient Types

Nutrient analysis for Organic by-products liquid and Organic by products solid are entered using dialog boxes similar those for biosolids analysis entry.

New Crops

To view the complete list of crops, go to A Guide to Crop Abbreviations

Barley grain + straw to annual cover crop

Corn silage to annual cover crop

Diversified vegetables (tilled, optionally with organic or plastic mulch)

Diversified vegetables to annual cover

Hemp industrial*

Pumpkin to small grain cover crop

Squash to small grain cover crop

Winter Triticale (forage) to corn grain

Winter Triticale (forage) to corn grain, baled stalks

Winter wheat (forage) to corn grain

Winter wheat (forage) to corn grain, baled stalks

*A note about Hemp :No research has been conducted on the nutritional needs of hemp grown in Wisconsin in 75 years. In order to develop nutrient application guidelines for hemp, available peer reviewed literature as well as conference abstracts/proceedings/posters, research station reports, and extension bulletins from the United States, Canada, and Europe were reviewed by UW-Extension faculty Dr. C. Laboski.

Tillage Additions

To view the complete list of tillages, go to Tillage Explanations

Snapbean: Fall chisel, no disk, Spring vertical till, and Fall vertical till

All Pea crops: Fall cultivation

Pumpkin and Squash crops: Fall Chisel, disked; No till; Spring Chisel, disk; Spring Cultivation

Corrections to SnapPlus’s RUSLE2 management templates that may change calculated soil loss

In previous versions, the barley, oats, rye, triticale and wheat crops where straw was harvested along with the grain (grain + straw), the RUSLE2 calculations did not include a straw removal operation. This oversight has been corrected in SnapPlus 17. Consequently, calculated soil loss may now be higher for rotations that include these crops with (grain+straw). NOTE: If rotational soil loss exceeds the tolerance (T) with grain+ straw crops when it did not in the past, changing the crop to simply grain should return the calculated soil loss back to acceptable levels as long as no other changes have been made in the rotation.

General fixes

Over 380 individual fixes were recorded in the SnapPlus team's issue tracker for version 17, along with 170-plus improvements and new features. A few of the significant fixes are listed here:

•Memory Issues with Large Farms: SnapPlus 17 has improved memory handling "under the hood". While farms with many crop years and hundreds of fields still take significantly longer to run than smaller ones, the program now bears up much better under that load. Adding memory to your computer can further improve performance for large farms.

•Excel Import Problems: Some combinations of Windows and Microsoft Office versions led to problems importing Excel files (e.g. soil tests), where SnapPlus would report that the file had an incorrect number of columns or some other confusing error message.

•No more missing-nutrient messages after merging farms: In some cases, merged farms would display an error message about a nutrient (usually a manure source) that did not exist and could not be deleted. SnapPlus 17 fixes the merge process, and repairs the problem if it appears in any farm opened.

Issues Fixed in 17.1

We uncovered some significant bugs after releasing 17.0, and are issuing a maintenance release.

•N recs for corn or wheat after soybeans or small grains are now correct.

•The $Spreading Plan Report (FM8) now reports the correct number of manure-spread acres.

Known issues

•Windows 7 or 10 Required: SnapPlus 17 will not install on older Microsoft Windows versions. Microsoft discontinued all support for Windows Vista in April 2017 and will do so again for Windows 7 in January of 2020. As of the Beta release, the SnapPlus installer has problems with Windows 8.

•Display Issues in Windows 8 and 10: Starting with Windows 8, we began noticing that sometimes elements of the SnapPlus user interface would display very oddly -- a grid like the Cropping Screen all mashed up in a corner, for example. This has to do with the Windows calls programs make when they display things on screen, and frequently occurs when users change the size of text in Windows settings. For more, see Windows 10 Display Problems.