Section (United States land surveying)
Sectioning a township (36 sections). Perfectly square full sections of farmland cover Central Indiana. Satellite image of crops growing in Kansas, mainly using center pivot irrigation. The primary grid pattern is of quarter sections ( 1 ⁄ 2 mi × 1 ⁄ 2 mi (800 m × 800 m)). In U.S. land surveying under the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), a section is an area nominally one square mile (2.6 square kilometers), containing 640 acres (260 hectares), with 36 sections making up one survey township on a rectangular grid. [1] The legal description of a tract of land under the PLSS includes the name of the state, name of the county, township number, range number, section number, and portion of a section. Sections are customarily surveyed into smaller squares by repeated halving and quartering. A quarter section is 160 acres (65 ha) and a "quarter-quarter section" is 40 acres (16 ha). In 1832 the smallest area of land that could be ...