About the site
County-level soil data, written in plain language.
SoilByCounty is independently published data journalism. We present the soil statistics that the federal government already collects — pH, texture, drainage, organic matter, hydrologic group — for every one of America's 3,144 counties.
What SoilByCounty Is
SoilByCounty is a data-journalism site, not an agronomy or engineering consultancy. Our purpose is to take county-level soil statistics published by the federal government and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are deciding where to garden, evaluating land for a home or farm, or just want to know what kind of soil your county has, this site is built for you.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: the USDA Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) Database and the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (PHZM). Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology — including the formula we use to compute county-level averages — is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs SoilByCounty
SoilByCounty is published and edited by Evan Brooks, Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to ingest public datasets from the USDA, U.S. Census Bureau, EPA, and other federal agencies, then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.
The data editor documents the methodology for composite scores and rankings across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. The data editor is the named editorial owner of this site: published statistics either match the source data or they are corrected.
The data editor is not a soil scientist, agronomist, or licensed geotechnical engineer, and SoilByCounty does not present itself as a professional soil-consulting resource. We do not diagnose soil problems, prescribe treatments, or recommend specific products. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the numbers, respect the underlying survey limitations, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.
Why I Built SoilByCounty
I started SoilByCounty after struggling to find clear, local soil and hardiness-zone data for gardening and land decisions. The USDA publishes extraordinary data through the SSURGO database and the Plant Hardiness Zone Map, but it is buried in GIS layers and technical reports. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, what kind of soil their county has — pH, texture, drainage, organic matter — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, schools, environmental risk, water quality, weather. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, aggregation formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
SoilByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the USDA Agricultural Research Service, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to the USDA Soil Data Access portal or to a local NRCS office — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, product recommendations, and unsourced inference. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a data site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.
Part of the ByCounty Network
SoilByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@soilbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
This page was last reviewed on by Evan Brooks, Data Editor.
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