From Spreadsheets to Statewide Insight
Clemson News
College of Agriculture, Forestry and Life Sciences
Current News From spreadsheets to statewide insight
Farmer collaborative and Clemson scholars turn a cumbersome crop-reporting process into an accessible, interactive mapping tool.
by Marlon Morgan
October 14, 2026
Kendall Kirk, director of the Clemson University Center for Agricultural Technology, helped develop CU-CAT Maps, a platform that turns spreadsheet data into interactive maps and automatically generates reports. The South Carolina FarmGate map is one of several maps hosted on the platform.
College of Agriculture, Forestry and Life Sciences
When Kevin Burkett, a Clemson University Extension agribusiness associate, and Justin Ballew, a Clemson fruit and vegetable research associate, restarted the South Carolina FarmGate Project, the goal was to gather valuable information on specialty crop acreage and yields to estimate crop value across the state.
It was an old tool and researchers needed it to be more powerful and work faster to help farmers guide their economic-based decisions about what they put in the ground each year.
For years, with the help of Clemson Cooperative Extension Service agents across the state, Extension associates manually gathered information and posted the data they collected on a previous FarmGate webpage. The process was cumbersome, labor-intensive and the final product was not very attractive. Reports were created crop-by-crop, while maps were often produced manually and shared only static, unengaging images.
Burkett and Ballew wanted something that was much easier to maintain, interactive for users and more pleasing to the eye. That’s when they turned to Kendall Kirk, director of the Clemson University Center for Agricultural Technology.
The result of that outreach is CU-CAT Maps, a platform that turns spreadsheet data into interactive maps and automatically generates reports. The South Carolina FarmGate map is one of several maps hosted on the platform.
What is FarmGate?