USDA's Soil Data Access holds soil-survey data for the entire 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, depth-weighted pH / available water / organic matter, and NCCPI productivity — as plain JSON.
// response will appear here
curl "https://soilpoint.dev/v1/soil?lat=37.368402&lon=-121.771"
USDA-NRCS SSURGO — the detailed US soil survey, public domain. SoilPoint resolves your point to its map unit, picks the dominant component, and depth-weights horizon properties over the top 0–30 cm. Returns the survey vintage so you know how fresh it is.
United States only (that's what SSURGO covers). Off-coverage points — ocean, gaps — return a clean 404. It's provided as-is for planning and exploration; not a substitute for on-site investigation, and not for regulatory determinations.
Free while we find out who needs this. No key required yet. If it's useful to you commercially, tell us — that's literally how we decide what to build next.
Soil Data Access is slow and flaky — we've watched single queries hang for the better part of a minute. SoilPoint caches every answer and keeps serving it through upstream outages, so your app doesn't fall over when USDA does.
cache-first · stale-serve on upstream failure · NCCPI fetched best-effort so a slow query never blocks your request