title: Change column type to int64 pandas geopandas best practice
body: <p>I am trying to convert a column containing floats with only .0 as decimals to an integer64. I found some older <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43956335/convert-float64-column-to-int64-in-pandas">answers</a> on this forum but they didn't seem to work anymore. Eventually I used: </p>
  
  <pre><code>df_test["column_name"] = df_test['column_name'].apply(lambda x: np.int64(x))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I was wondering if this is best practice in pandas and how this compares <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15891038/change-data-type-of-columns-in-pandas">to to_numeric()</a></p>