Where the water goes, and what your land will grow.
Draw your property on the map, anywhere in the lower 48 states, and a few minutes later you have a report of 8 to 13 pages on it.
- Water in the yard or the basement? See where it comes from (the ground uphill, or a water table that rises in spring), where it gathers first, and where it leaves.
- Just bought land, now what? See which ground to plant first, where a pond or swale works, what grows in your zone and your soil, and whether the plan you drew holds up.
One payment, no account. Your report opens at a private link you can keep, print or save as a PDF. Card payments are handled by Stripe. What we keep.
$175, with an hour on your land
Brian Schneider walks the land with you for about an hour, and you get the full report printed. $175 flat, around Duluth.
We can recommend you to a designer in your area
For a design, a consultation or help building it, tell us where the land is and what you have in mind. We'll point you to a designer who works near you, and you work with them directly. No charge for the introduction.
What's inside
Every page is about your boundary and nowhere else, written so someone who has never read a soil survey can use it. These are the eight pages every report has, taken from the sample.
Two more parts come from what you tell the map before you order, and add up to five pages at most: one for your goals, up to three for your design, and the last page can run to two. Skip them and the report reads the land alone. The sample is a real 10-acre property in northern Minnesota, shown with its owner's OK. Three goals were ticked (feed the household, water security, wildlife and habitat), and a 17-element homestead plan was drawn for the sample around the clearing and the building already standing in it, including a kitchen bed, a rain tank, compost, a chicken run, fruit trees and fruiting shrubs, a hazel windbreak, a small pond and a path to it. The check marked 1 element to fix, 11 to check and 5 placed well. The fix is a peach, put in on purpose: peach is rated hardy in zones 5 to 8, and this land is zone 3b.
The land, read for what you want from it
Tick what the land is for on the map's Start tab: feed the household, water security, income, wildlife and habitat, community space, a place to heal and make things, low maintenance. The report gets a page that reads this land again for each one, with this site's numbers: how much of it is growing ground, how long the frost-free season runs, where water gathers and how much a roof sheds, which side the winter wind hits.
Say how far along you are, too. Pick new to this and each goal ends with a place to start. Pick experienced and you get the technical figures: hydrologic soil group, the water the soil holds, contour interval, keypoint elevations and valley grades, growing degree days, 1-in-10 frost dates. The first steps then follow P. A. Yeomans' Scale of Permanence.
Your plan, held against the design principles
Draw your plan on the map's Design tab before you order. Each element is checked against the same elevation, soil, sun and wind data the report reads:
- Swales on contour, on a slope and soil that suit them
- Diversion drains with a gentle, steady fall that end at a pond or a safe outlet
- Ponds with enough ground draining to them, on soil that holds water
- Garden beds near the house, out of wet ground, frost pockets and shade
- Trees hardy in your zone, suited to the soil, with room to grow
- Windbreaks across the winter wind, on the side it comes from
- Buildings off wet and low ground
- Compost and animal yards that don't drain into your water
- Paths that don't run straight down steep ground
Each one is marked fix, check or placed well, with the measurement behind the mark, on a map of your plan with every element numbered. The plan as a whole is checked too: whether it serves the goals you ticked, whether each need is met by at least two elements, and whether each element does at least three jobs. These are rules of thumb from the permaculture and extension literature, not a site visit.
Read from the surveys, not guessed
Each number comes from a public national dataset, fetched for your exact boundary when you order.
Elevation
USGS 3D Elevation Program: lidar at about a meter where it has been flown, and 10-meter data everywhere else.
Soil and wetlands
USDA NRCS soil survey, the same maps behind Web Soil Survey, with its own ratings for septic fields, houses and rain gardens; and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's National Wetlands Inventory.
Climate
NOAA's 1991–2020 normals from a nearby weather station, named in the report with its distance and the years of record behind it.
Wind
Ten years of daily wind from NASA's POWER project.
Aerial photograph
USDA's National Agriculture Imagery Program, flown every few years.
Plants
A curated library of 150 useful plants, filtered to your USDA hardiness zone and matched to your soil. In Minnesota the natives are marked, going by Minnesota Wildflowers, the Bell Museum's state flora checklist and the MN DNR.
How it works
Draw your land
Find the place on the map and trace the boundary. In Minnesota you can tap your parcel instead, and the county's parcel lines become the boundary. Tick what the land is for, and draw your plan on the Design tab if you have one. It's free, and you can look at the terrain, soils and climate before buying anything.
Type the address and pay
The address you type becomes the title of your report. $49, once, through Stripe.
Open your report
It's built from the surveys in a few minutes and opens at a private link. Bookmark it, print it, or save it as a PDF.
Who it's for
Water where you don't want it
A wet yard, a soggy corner, water against the foundation. The report shows where runoff comes onto the lot, where it gathers first and where it leaves, how much a roof sheds, and whether the soil survey puts a water table near the surface in spring, so you know where to look first in the next hard rain.
Planting, homesteading or improving land you own
Just bought it, or finally have time for it? See which ground to plant first, where a pond or swale would work, and which fruit trees and berries are hardy in your zone. Draw your plan, and the report says what to move before you dig.
Selling land
A report in the listing shows buyers where the water goes, what the soil does, how long the season runs and what grows. For several listings at once, write to hello@landassay.com.
Buying land
See where water sits, how deep the soil is and how long the season runs before you make an offer. The report covers water, soil, season and what grows, with what the soil survey rates the ground for a septic field, a house and a rain garden, and how much of it the National Wetlands Inventory maps as wetland; it doesn't cover access, survey, zoning or septic permits.
What it isn't
- A survey. Your boundary is the line you draw, or in Minnesota the county's tax-map parcel lines; neither is a surveyed legal line.
- A perc test, septic design or well report.
- A zoning, flood-zone, easement or title check. The county answers those.
- A guarantee for your microclimate. It's the best public data read carefully; walking the land in a hard rain still beats it.
- A designer's plan. The design check holds the plan you drew against rules of thumb; it doesn't draw one for you.
What we keep, and what we don't
- Kept with your order: the boundary you drew, the address you typed, the design, goals and experience level you sent with it, the email address Stripe passes back after payment, and the report itself. They stay so your private link keeps working. A checkout that isn't paid for is deleted about two days after it closes. If a bank payment was started, it's kept until that payment clears or fails, for up to 30 days.
- Never here: your card. Payment happens on Stripe's page, and Stripe holds the card details under its own privacy policy.
- Your email is used to send you the link if the report isn't ready when you return, and for refunds or questions. No list, no marketing, never shared or sold.
- The link is a private, unlisted address that search engines are told not to index. Anyone you give it to can open it, so share it the way you would share the PDF.
- A plan you share from the map is copied to an unguessable address, and anyone with the link can see it. The copy is kept until it goes unused for over a year, then deleted.
- The map's address search sends what you type to Esri (suggestions as you type), the US Census Bureau and OpenStreetMap, to find the place; nothing of it is kept here. Esri's suggestions are Esri's ArcGIS location services, and using them means following Esri's terms for them.
- No account, no analytics, no tracking. The map sets one cookie: a random ID that brings your saved designs back to this browser, with nothing about you in it.
- Want it gone? Write to hello@landassay.com with your link, and the order (with its boundary, design and goals), the report and your email are deleted.
Start with the map
Looking is free. Draw the land, see the terrain and soils, and order the report when you want it written up.
Open the map$175, with an hour on your land
Brian Schneider walks the land with you for about an hour, and you get the full report printed. $175 flat, around Duluth.
We can recommend you to a designer in your area
Tell us where the land is and what you want from it: a design, a consultation or a build. We'll point you to someone who works near you. No charge for the introduction.