SoilPoint · USDA-NRCS SSURGO via Soil Data Access soilpoint.dev
Soil data API · free · US coverage

Soil for any US coordinate. As clean JSON, not T-SQL.

USDA's Soil Data Access has soil-survey data for the whole United States, behind a hostile T-SQL-over-HTTP interface that returns ESRI blobs. SoilPoint wraps it. One GET /v1/soil?lat=&lon= returns the dominant soil's series, texture, drainage, hydrologic group, pH, available water and organic matter (depth-weighted over the top 30 cm), and NCCPI productivity, as plain JSON.

Try it live ↓ What this is
Live · this calls the real API

Pick a point. Get its soil.

Ready. Click a point above or hit “Fetch soil”.
// response will appear here
curl "https://soilpoint.dev/v1/soil?lat=37.368402&lon=-121.771"

The fine print

The data

USDA-NRCS SSURGO, the detailed US soil survey (public domain). SoilPoint finds the map unit under your point, picks its dominant component, and depth-weights horizon properties over the top 0–30 cm. The response includes the survey date so you know how old the data is.

Coverage & limits

United States only, because that's what SSURGO covers. Points with no survey (ocean, gaps in coverage) get a clean 404. The data is as-is, for planning and exploration. It doesn't replace an on-site investigation and isn't for regulatory decisions.

Free, for now

Free while we find out who needs this. No key required yet. If you'd use it commercially, tell us. That's how we decide what to build next.

USDA's service goes down. Cached answers don't.

Soil Data Access is slow and flaky. We've watched single queries hang for most of a minute. SoilPoint keeps every answer in memory, so a point anyone has looked up since our last deploy keeps working while USDA is down. A point nobody has asked for yet gets a 502 until USDA is back.

cache-first · cached points keep working during USDA outages · one USDA query per new point, NCCPI included