The United States has surveyed nearly every acre of its soil. That data is public, authoritative, and almost nobody can use it. Lab10YR exists to close that gap — turning the raw national soil database into plain-language risk intelligence anyone can act on.
SSURGO — the national soil survey — holds hundreds of thousands of map units, millions of laboratory horizon measurements, and millions of interpretive ratings. It describes drainage, shrink-swell potential, corrosivity, organic matter, productivity, and dozens of other properties for the ground under every project, farm, and parcel in the country.
But it lives behind a SQL API, a tangle of foreign keys, and terminology that takes years to learn. The result: enterprise platforms repackage it and charge $25,000 to $150,000 a year, while the engineer, appraiser, farmer, or developer who actually needs one answer is locked out.
Lab10YR queries the live Soil Data Access API directly — no middleware, no black box — and translates the result into something a non-specialist can use: a county risk report, a site hazard profile, an area agronomic assessment, an interpretation explained in plain English. Every tool shows the underlying query, so the numbers can be verified independently.
The same library of production SQL that powers the public tools is available as consulting: custom queries, site and county reports, and expert interpretation for decisions that turn on what the soil will do over the next ten years.
Every number traces back to a query against the live national survey. No estimates, no interpolation from satellite imagery, nothing you can't reproduce yourself.
The value isn't the data — it's the answer. Reports say what the soil means for the decision in front of you, not just what the ratings are.
The core tools are free and public. The deeper analysis is priced for an individual practitioner, not an enterprise procurement department.
Try the free tools, or send a 2-sentence description of your project for a fixed-price assessment.