USDA NASS Crop Sequence Boundaries (CSB)
Areas of homogeneous 8-year crop rotation, not legal field parcels — USDA's Crop Sequence Boundaries via fiboa.
What this is
CSB is USDA NASS's open dataset of crop-rotation zones across the contiguous US. Each polygon represents a contiguous run of CDL pixels that share the same multi-year crop sequence — a rotation-pattern zone, not a surveyed or operational field boundary. UFFDA serves CSB nationwide via fiboa's `us_usda_cropland` GeoParquet encode published on source.coop (CSB v2023, 16.2M polygons, full lower-48). Click any zone for an 8-year crop history fetched live from the CDL service. For field identity — the actual perimeter of a managed field — UFFDA uses FTW (Fields of The World), which IS a field-boundary layer. CSB and FTW answer different questions; they're complements, not substitutes.
Why we surface it
Rotation context, not field identity — FTW is the field-identity layer. CSB tells you how a piece of cropland has been managed over the last eight years (corn-on-corn, corn-soy, alfalfa rotation, etc.). That's high-signal context for almost every ag question that isn't about a specific field's perimeter.
What you can do with it
Shown for commercial use. Personal, research, and nonprofit use is often more permissive — switch the verdict lens on the catalog.
- Internal / individual use
- Public domain. Use it for anything — internal, resale, AI training, closed products. No attribution legally required (crediting the source is still the decent thing to do).
- Redistribute the data
- Public domain. Use it for anything — internal, resale, AI training, closed products. No attribution legally required (crediting the source is still the decent thing to do).
- Republish a derivative
- Public domain. Use it for anything — internal, resale, AI training, closed products. No attribution legally required (crediting the source is still the decent thing to do).
- Build into a private product
- Public domain. Use it for anything — internal, resale, AI training, closed products. No attribution legally required (crediting the source is still the decent thing to do).
This decoder is a starting point, not legal advice. For commercial deployment, run the actual license terms past someone who reads them for a living.
Good to know
What CSB is NOT: CSB polygons are dissolved from CDL pixel classifications (USDA's 30m per-pixel crop raster, stitched across 8 years). They are NOT surveyed field perimeters, not legal parcels, not what a farmer would draw around their operation. A single CSB polygon often spans pieces of several real fields that happen to share a rotation; conversely, a real field with mixed rotation can split across multiple CSB zones. For the actual field perimeter, use FTW.
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