Abstract
The buffering technique in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was used to estimate the land area of a fadama for inland farming. The investigation was carried out in Akure (7°15´N, 5°15´E) in May 2008. The Ikonos satellite image of the five hundred hectare land area at 4 m  resolution was georeferenced using ArcView 3.3 GIS software to make locations on the image align to positions on the earth’s surface. A submap of the image that contained a perennial stream was generated and the stream buffered at a distance of 100 m away from the stream on all sides. The buffered zone depicting the fadama land was polygonized and the total area computed as 34.19 hectares and locations for soil studies in the buffered zone identified on the map. The field work entailed locating on the ground with the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver the points for soil studies already identified on the digital map. Soil samples were taken from the surface (0-30 cm) and subsoil (30-100 cm) for laboratory analysis of soil physical and chemical properties.