Commodity Crop Index: LandApp's New Farmland Productivity Score
Evaluating agricultural land potential just got significantly faster. LandApp is excited to introduce our newest data feature: the Commodity Crop Index. Designed to give landowners, buyers, farm managers, and land professionals an immediate line of sight into soil productivity, this index ranks parcel potential on a clear, standardized 0 to 100 scale.
What is LandApp’s Commodity Crop Index?
LandApp’s Commodity Crop Index is a soil-based productivity score. It evaluates the soil map units that make up a parcel, the individual soil types identified across the property, on their relative capability to produce commodity crops, then rolls that evaluation up into a single 0 to 100 score for the property. A higher score means the underlying soil is relatively better suited to commodity crop production; a lower score points to soil with more limiting characteristics, whether that's texture, drainage, slope, or another constraint on productivity.
The Commodity Crop Index in LandApp isn't a projected yield, a revenue forecast, or a guarantee of what will grow well on a given acre. It's a standardized way to compare the underlying soil quality of one parcel against another, or one section of a parcel against the rest of it, using a consistent, relative scale.
How is The Commodity Crop Index Calculated?
The Commodity Crop Index measures a property’s potential for producing commodity crops based on the productivity of its soils. Each soil unit is scored according to the most productive crop it can support, and those scores are combined across the property to create an overall index score rated on a scale of 0 to 100.
Component-Level Evaluation: Individual soil map units contain various soil components, each with differing capabilities for growing specific commodity crops (such as corn, soybeans, wheat, or cotton).
Peak Productivity Rating: The index analyzes each soil component and assigns a score based on the crop that yields the highest relative productivity for that specific soil.
Map Unit & Parcel Score: The overall score for a soil map unit is calculated by taking the weighted average of its components. LandApp then aggregates this data across the entire parcel boundary to deliver a single score from 0 to 100.
To see your property’s proprietary Commodity Crop Index, get a free LandApp Property Report. It includes your parcel’s unique index score alongside soil types, prime farmland classification, estimated lease values, and Risk Index Scores. Simply find your parcel on our map to get your free report.
How is The Commodity Crop Index Calculated?
On LandApp’s map within our free map-based data layers, the Commodity Crop Index is shaded from white at the low end of the scale to dark green at the high end. The darker the green, the higher the score, and the more capable that soil is of producing commodity crops relative to other soil nationwide. This makes it easy to scan a parcel at a glance and spot where the strongest ground sits, or to notice when a property's soil quality varies significantly from one end to the other, which can matter for how you plan crop placement, negotiate an agricultural land lease, or decide where to focus an offer.
What Is the National Commodity Crop Productivity Index (NCCPI)?
If you've spent time around soil data before, you may already know the National Commodity Crop Productivity Index, or NCCPI. It's a productivity model, produced by the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), that ranks the inherent capacity of soils to produce crops without irrigation, and it's used widely for land valuation and management. Because it draws on soil survey data available in every county where commodity crops are grown, it produces consistent, comparable ratings across state and political boundaries.
The NRCS model currently scores land against four representative crops, corn, soybeans, small grains, and cotton, and reports results on a scale from 0.01 to 1, with 1 representing the most productive soil. It's also built to reflect long-term, relative productivity rather than any single year's results, since a soil's inherent capacity doesn't change much even as weather and management practices do.
How It's Different From LandApp's Commodity Crop Index
NCCPI and LandApp's Commodity Crop Index share the same broad approach, both rate soil's relative capacity for commodity crop production using detailed soil survey data, rather than tracking a single year's yield or weather. Beyond that starting point, they're separate models:
Source: NCCPI is a federal dataset published by the USDA's NRCS. LandApp's Commodity Crop Index is LandApp's own data layer, purpose-built for parcel-level land evaluation.
Scale: NCCPI reports on a 0.01 to 1 scale. LandApp's index is scored on a more intuitive 0 to 100 scale, shaded on the map from white to dark green.
Access: Reading NCCPI generally means pulling soil survey data through a GIS tool. LandApp's score is built directly into the free nationwide parcel map and into every Property Report, so there's no separate soil-data lookup required.
The upshot: if you've relied on NCCPI before, LandApp's Commodity Crop Index will feel familiar in concept, a soil-based, relative productivity rating, just delivered in a format built for quick, parcel-by-parcel decisions rather than GIS analysis.
Why The Commodity Crop Index is Important, By Audience
LandApp’s Commodity Crop Index is valuable for landowners, realtors, brokers, and buyers/investors to understand more about their properties or properties they’re interested in purchasing.
For Landowners
For landowners, a quick standardized read on soil quality helps you think through where to invest in improvements, how to frame a lease negotiation, or how one tract in your portfolio stacks up against another, all before you call in a soil scientist or agronomist for a deeper look.
For Realtors and Land Brokers
Ag and rural listings live and die on soil quality, and buyers ask about it early. Having a defensible, easy-to-explain productivity score, paired with prime farmland classification and soil type data, gives you a stronger listing packet and a faster way to answer a buyer's first question.
For Land Buyers and Investors
When you're screening dozens of parcels across a region for property investment, the Commodity Crop Index is a fast first filter. Use it to narrow your list, then layer in the Property Report's lease value estimates and risk scores before committing time to a full on-site evaluation.
FAQ
What does the Commodity Crop Index measure?
It measures a soil's relative capacity to produce commodity crops on a 0 to 100 scale, based on an evaluation of the soil map units and soil components that make up a parcel.
What does a higher score mean?
A higher score means the soil is relatively better suited to commodity crop production than soil with a lower score. Lower scores point to limiting factors such as texture, drainage, or slope.
Is the Commodity Crop Index the same as a crop yield estimate?
No. It's a comparative measure of soil productivity potential, not a projected yield or revenue figure. Actual yields depend on weather, management practices, irrigation, and the crop grown.
How is the score calculated for a parcel?
Soil map units are evaluated across several productivity factors and ranked relative to other soil units. Since a map unit can include multiple soil components, its score is the average of its components' scores, with each component scored using its most productive commodity crop.
Where can I see a property's Commodity Crop Index score?
It's available as a free, color-shaded map layer covering the entire U.S., and it's also included in every Property Report for a parcel.
See Your Commodity Crop Index Score
Ready to see how a property scores? Open the Commodity Crop Index layer within the Soil Types layer on LandApp's free nationwide parcel map, or generate a free Property Report to see the score alongside soil types, lease values, and risk data for any parcel in the U.S.
