How AgriTerra calculates this

1. Data sources and how fresh they are

Each row below is a public dataset we read to build a report. The “Powers” column tells you which part of the report depends on it. Where a source is currently live in only certain states, its badge names them (for example Ohio or Indiana); the six federal datasets — USDA NASS, USDA NRCS SSURGO, NREL, FEMA, USGS, USFWS — work nationwide. This table, and every figure elsewhere on this page, is generated from the live data layer at build time (npm run build:methodology), so it can never drift from the numbers the product actually ships.

Some sources are read live at report time (PVWatts, the USGS Water Data APIs, the US Drought Monitor); others are bundled snapshots we refresh on the cadence shown. Parcel boundaries are live in Ohio (via OGRIP) and Indiana (via the live IndianaMap / IGIO statewide FeatureServer); the other state-specific datasets above are live in Ohio first, and coverage is rolling out state by state. Where a dataset has no entry for your location, the report says “data unavailable” rather than filling the gap with a guess.

2. How we estimate solar & wind income

For energy leases we report a dollar band — low / mid / high per acre per year — instead of a single number, because a categorical rating like “very high wind” tells a landowner nothing they can price. The band is the smallest unit you can actually act on.

Where the dollar bands come from

The payment bands are AgriTerra-modeled — not a mirrored published rate card — and every cell names its real basis:

• Solar: anchored to the AgriTerra Solar Lease Band (Purdue/OSU anchored) (as of 2026-08-01) — operating-phase lease-offer surveys (Purdue Ag Economy Barometer) and OSU Extension leasing guidance, modeled into bands. These are offer distributions across surveyed farmers, not a per-parcel rate card; for example, an OH parcel in the mid irradiance bucket carries an estimated $800–$1,225/ac/yr (mid $1,000) . Option-period payments ($10–$50/ac/yr) are much lower than operating-phase payments.
• Wind: the AgriTerra Wind Lease Band (NDSU/ACP/NREL derived) (as of 2026-08-01) , derived transparently as wind lease payment ($/MW/yr, from NDSU Extension guidance cross-checked by ACP’s Iowa fleet average) ÷ project land use (acres/MW, from NREL/TP-6A2-45834). for example, an IA parcel (resource bucket 5) carries an estimated $56–$80/ac/yr (mid $65) . The band is blended per-gross-acre income; a parcel that actually hosts turbines can earn materially more per turbine, concentrated on the hosting acres.

What LBNL actually publishes: the LBNL Utility-Scale Solar and Land-Based Wind Market Report editions cover deployment, CapEx, capacity factors, and PPA pricing — they contain no landowner lease-payment tables. Earlier versions of this page cited fabricated LBNL tables for lease dollars; those citations were removed and the bands re-sourced. See “How we verify our sources,” below.

We store the full low-to-high spread and surface the middle (25th–75th percentile) range on your report, with the wider spread retained for the PDF. Wind resource class drives viability, not price — published evidence does not show lease rates scaling with wind class; rates are set by competition and project economics. The mid value drives the plain-language rating:

Wind rating from the mid band

Solar rating from the mid band

How a parcel lands in a band

• Solar: we query NREL PVWatts v8 at the parcel for modeled annual output (kWh per kW), then compare it to that state’s 25th/50th/75th-percentile output to pick the low / mid / high bucket. Sunlight buckets the band — it is not a viability gate.
• Wind: we assign a coarse AgriTerra wind resource bucket read off the NREL/WINDExchange 100 m wind maps (these are AgriTerra buckets — not an “NREL Wind Toolkit class,” which is not a real NREL taxonomy), then read the matching state-and-bucket band.
• Grid & siting: a solar lease is considered at 25 acres, within about 2 miles of a 69 kV-or-higher transmission line . Line adjacency does not guarantee interconnection capacity — substation / point-of-interconnection hosting capacity is the binding constraint — and per LBNL Queued Up, only ~13% of capacity requested 2000–2020 reached commercial operation by end-2025 (median request-to-COD > 5 years). State/county siting policy is a further gate (see below).

Energy policy viability gate

Since 2025–26, state and county siting policy — plus the federal tax-credit vintage — is often the binding constraint on a renewable lease, so an energy scenario is gated on it (policy data as of 2026-08-02 ). A new wind lease in Iowa is demoted to “repowering only” (new-build has collapsed); a solar lease in a documented restricted county is demoted with the specific reason; and every energy scenario carries the OBBBA lease-vintage note — projects that began construction by July 4, 2026 retain the §45Y/48E credits, while a new option signed today backs a post-credit project with longer odds and timelines. Ohio landowners also see CAUV recoupment and PILOT disclosures; Indiana, the ~9–12× solar land reassessment; Iowa, its wind/solar tax mechanics.

What these numbers are — and are not

These are defensible seed bands, not lease offers. They are deliberately coarse in v1: the wind bucket comes from latitude rather than a full wind-resource raster, and the solar percentiles are sampled rather than computed from a statewide irradiance grid. They tell you whether energy income is worth pursuing and roughly what scale to expect — not what any single developer will pay you. Every per-cell citation is machine-checked (see “How we verify our sources,” below) and refreshed on the cadence in the table above.

3. Conservation, mineral rights, timber, and hunting leases

Mineral rights Ohio

In Ohio we read the Ohio DNR Oil & Gas Wells (RBDMS) dataset for well presence inside the parcel and the nearest-well distance. This shows drilling activity; it does not establish who owns the minerals or whether rights have been severed. The report points you to the county recorder for ownership and severance — the only authoritative record. Outside Ohio we provide the relevant state recorder link rather than a data layer.

Conservation (CRP)

CRP rental rates come from the USDA FSA CRP Monthly Summary, split by signup type: a competitive general-signup band (capped at $240/ac) and a continuous/CREP band (buffers, waterways, wetlands), which dominates the eastern Corn Belt and runs materially higher. We surface both and let the parcel’s practice context indicate the likely path, with the caveat that enrollment is competitive. New CRP enrollment is paused: FSA's authority to approve new CRP contracts ended Sept 30, 2026 (USDA FSA Notice CRP-1101, Sept 25, 2026). Until Congress extends it, a report shows CRP as a status line with no CRP payment figure for the parcel. CRP contracts FSA approved by Sept 30, 2026 keep receiving their annual rental and other contract payments (USDA FSA Notice CRP-1101). ARC-CO and PLC are Title I commodity programs (contingent payments on FSA base acres, requiring active production) — they are surfaced under the farm path as upside, never mislabeled as conservation.

Timber

We count forest acres from USDA CropScape (CDL) forest pixels and multiply by a per-acre stumpage value from the OSU Extension Ohio Timber Price Report (July 2026 (Spring 2026 survey)) in Ohio and the Indiana Consulting Foresters Stumpage Timber Price Report (2025 sales — published Indiana Woodland Steward Vol. 35 No. 1 (2026)) in Indiana ($/MBF, Doyle scale); other states use a clearly flagged generic fallback. This is a one-time standing-timber value estimate, not an annual income figure. The high-yield tier assumes near-complete removal of a fully stocked mature stand (Doyle-scale volumes read ~10–30% under International ¼-inch), and a walnut/white-oak-heavy stand prices materially above the conservative blend — a forester’s cruise is the next step before acting on it.

Recreational (hunting) lease

Recreational-lease bands are AgriTerra market indications (the AgriTerra recreational-lease market indications (MSU Extension / brokerage) ) — compiled from MSU Extension hunting-lease guidance and regional brokerage commentary, routed by state and county to a regional band. They are modeled estimates, not a published rate table. If the parcel centroid is within about 500 m of a USFWS National Wildlife Refuge / Wildlife Management Area, we apply a +15% adjacency premium — an AgriTerra heuristic with no published research basis (the hedonic hunting-lease literature finds public-land proximity ambiguous), which renders as an “AgriTerra adjustment.” These are advisory regional typical rates (band mids), not transactional comps.

4. Multiple parcels and partial parcels

A single report can cover several parcels at once. When it does, each parcel is analyzed on its own data — its own soil, its own crop history, its own energy and lease bands — and the report adds a combined summary on top. Nothing is averaged across parcels in a way that would hide a weak one behind a strong one.

You can also draw a partial parcel — a slice of a larger field — directly on the map. When you do, the slice becomes the unit of analysis: its acreage is measured from the shape you drew, and the report opens by stating plainly that it covers an N-acre slice of the larger parcel rather than the whole thing. Every figure that follows is scaled to the slice, not the parent.

5. How the written analysis is produced

The numbers in your report are fetched and calculated by the steps above. The sentences that explain those numbers are assembled by a writing step, under strict constraints. We want to be completely transparent about how that works:

In practice that means:

• Every dollar amount, acreage, percentage, year, county, soil class, and crop label in the prose must match a value already computed from the datasets above. The writing step is told, in its hard rules, not to compute, estimate, round further, or interpolate.
• If a value is missing, the report says “data unavailable” — it never invents a placeholder to keep a sentence flowing.
• It may not introduce place names, agencies, programs, neighbors, comparable sales, prices, or legal instruments that are not in the data. v1 makes no land-value or comparable-sale claims at all.
• If the writing step can’t produce a valid, on-spec section, that section falls back to a fixed, human-written template, and the report is marked as partial rather than shipping unverified prose.

The goal is simple: the explanation is just words wrapped around audited numbers. You can ignore the prose entirely and check every figure against its source line.

How we verify our sources

A citation that exists is not the same as a citation that is true. Our automated tests already enforce that every data cell carries a source; a separate check enforces that the source is real. A build step extracts every distinct source and dataset edition into a manifest, and an append-only verification log records that a person opened the cited document, confirmed the figures, and initialed it — so an edition refresh isn’t done until it’s verified. A tombstone check blocks any previously-removed fabricated citation from ever returning. This page and its numbers are themselves generated from that data layer at build time, so the documentation can’t drift from what the product ships.

6. How to challenge a number we got wrong

You know your land better than any dataset does. If a figure looks off — a cash rent that’s low for irrigated ground, a soil class that doesn’t match what you farm — we want to hear it, and every number in your report is built to be checkable: it carries the source it came from and the date we read it.