USDA SSURGO / gNATSGO soil
Field-level soil characteristics — slope, drainage, hydric status, water storage, Land Capability Class. Queried live, per field, across the contiguous US.
What this is
SSURGO is USDA's high-resolution soil survey. UFFDA queries the dominant soil component per field via the Soil Data Access (SDA) API and returns map-unit name, drainage class, hydric/non-hydric, Land Capability Class, and Available Water Storage. That query runs live: click a field anywhere in the contiguous US and the numbers are fetched at that moment, not read from a pre-built table. The same query backs the soil block in the public field-enrichment API.
Why we surface it
Soil is destiny in ag. The difference between a Class II silty clay loam and a Class IV poorly drained mucky peat is the difference between corn-and-soybean rotations and pasture. Surfacing this in plain English on every field is the highest-value context after crop history.
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.
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