RATIONALE
Land requirement for country development tends to increase since land is a basic factor
necessary for production process both in and outside of the agricultural sector. Land is a limited
factor. Consequently, the area expansion of an activity often affects another and has a relatively
serious competition in terms of needs to acquire a land without any considerations or
evaluations of land potentials whether it is suitable for the needed activity or not. As a result,
land miuse to scatter everywhere. The Department of Land Development (LDD) whose
responsibility is taking care of land use for agricultural purposes, always realize the problems
arisen. Therefore, land use plans in the national, regional, provincial, and village levels are
conducted (LDD, 1993). However, land use plan that has been made before is not applicable in
some situations since it is not updated, especially information concerning land requirement for
agricultural purpose due to the fact that most farmers tend to grow crops in response to market
price. Conducting an achievable land use plan requires updated information much enough to
support the plan making. Therefore, land use planning is mainly a process of analysis or
evaluation to find the area most suitable to or potential for a defined activity. To do this, it is
necessary to examine the relationship between land information, land use, and economic aspects
to match the land requirement (LDD, 1993). The mentioned information is processed from sets
of information in the area and such information is complex or varied according to the area. It
takes quite a long time to make a plan. Thus, land use plan creation can hardly respond to the
changing situations. Nowadays, computer technology either hardware or software is more
efficient. Many systems have been developed, including Geographic Information System or GIS. It is capable of systemically storing and analyzing either spatial data or non-spatial data of
a great amount. Furthermore, GIS is flexible and lets the operators create models of a situation
they need. Therefore, applying GIS in land evaluation to provide fundamental information
supporting in decision making on land use plan seems to be able to reduce problems caused by
improper land use mentioned above. The objective of this study was to create spatial
information on the suitability of land for economic crops and for agricultural land use planning