Comment by L3dge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by L3dge | Hacker News Reader

I built Land Atlas, a web application for analyzing the agricultural potential of land listings. The main goal is to answer: What is the quality of the soil? How farmable is the property? Which crops are best suited to its soil and growing conditions? Most property listings contain price, acreage, photographs, and a short description, but provide little structured information about agricultural viability. Land Atlas combines listing and geospatial data with: Soil type and texture Soil productivity indicators pH and organic matter Drainage and water capacity Slope and terrain Flooding and ponding Climate and growing conditions Crop requirements The application attempts to convert those inputs into: Soil-quality assessments Farmability scores Property limitations Crop-suitability rankings One difficult part has been accurately resolving rural listings. Postal cities, listing labels, coordinates, and physical parcel locations frequently disagree. I recently changed the location hierarchy to prioritize parcel identifiers and listing-provided coordinates over ordinary address geocoding. I would appreciate feedback on: Soil-scoring methodology Crop-suitability modeling Parcel-level versus point-level analysis Communicating uncertainty Global agricultural datasets Normalizing data between jurisdictions Demo: https://land-atlas-production.up.railway.app/

I checked it on a property I own in Temecula CA. It gave me great stats but not being a farmer I didn’t talk know what I was looking at. Tooltips or links to definitions would help a lot. The property scores 64 overall.

I like the idea but I wonder if your market might be larger still by including precipitation and sunlight, elevation, tax rates, and distance from highways.

He already has precipitation, elevation, and distance from highways. I don't think I saw sunlight or tax rates.

I suspect you didn't do much digging into the content before posting since 3/5 of the things you mentioned are already there and easy to locate.

Precipitation - Select one of the properties to view. In the right sidebar the listing should appear. In that sidebar there is a heading "Water Security" so select that. The first item in that list is the expected annual precipitation.

Elevation - Select one of the properties to view. It will appear on the right sidebar. The main listing block includes the property elevation, in meters, and maximum relief in meters. Under the "Parcel Report" you can find the slope, probably an average value, in percent. Just below that information you find the nearest major road distance, in miles.

With those notes, it feels like there is room here for a units toggle to select metric or American. Mix and match just feels like I'm selecting wrenches while working on a late 90's vehicle. Use the one that fits best.

Property Taxes are mentioned in the "Diligence Documents" drop-down at the bottom of the list.

In a different comment I suggested they include sunlight data so that people could determine suitability for solar installs especially for rural sites that are not close to grid power.

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