Field Scout — draw a field and get its soil, crop rotation, weather, drought history, and local cash bids.

Drop a pin on your field (or trace its boundary), and Field Scout queries the USDA SSURGO soil survey for every soil map unit inside the polygon. You get each soil series by name — Clarion loam, Webster clay loam, and so on — along with its land capability class and slope, so you can see exactly how the ground varies across the field. No login, no charge.

Field Scout reads the USDA Cropland Data Layer (CDL), a satellite-classified record of what grew on each parcel each season, and shows the dominant crop inside your field for the last ten available years. It's the fastest way to check a field's rotation — useful for scouting, due diligence on rented or purchased ground, or spotting a corn-on-corn streak.

Land capability class is a USDA rating from 1 to 8 that describes how suited a soil is to row-crop production. Class 1 has few limitations; class 2–4 ground faces progressively more (slope, wetness, erosion risk); classes 5–8 are better suited to pasture, range, or woodland. Field Scout shows the non-irrigated capability class for each soil on your field so you can see where your strongest and weakest acres are.

The National Commodity Crop Productivity Index (NCCPI) is a USDA index from 0 to 1 that rates inherent soil productivity for commodity crops on a single national scale. Because it's national, strong ground in a dry or sandy region can still read lower than Corn Belt mollisols — so Field Scout presents it as context, never as a verdict on your management.

The Cropland Data Layer is satellite-classified at roughly 85–90% per-pixel accuracy, and Field Scout samples the dominant cover at your field's center point. A single odd year in the sequence is more often a classification miss than a real planting change, so read the ten-year pattern rather than any one season.

Continuous corn isn't automatically wrong, but it carries a measurable yield drag — commonly several to fifteen bushels an acre versus rotated corn — plus rising rootworm and disease pressure, and it forgoes the nitrogen a soybean year credits back. The drag tends to cost more on productive ground, because there are more bushels to lose. Field Scout flags a streak and, where a cash bid is nearby, estimates what the drag is worth per acre.

Field Scout pulls the current US Drought Monitor classification (None through D4, Exceptional Drought) for your field's location, so you can see at a glance whether moisture is an acute concern this week. It's the same nationally-recognized scale used for federal disaster and program eligibility.

Yes — turn on the Hail history layer and Field Scout maps severe-hail storm reports near your field over the last five years, including the largest stone sizes reported. It's a useful gut-check for crop-hail coverage decisions, with a direct link to the national hail map for the wider picture.

Field Scout shows the closest cash corn and soybean bids to your field from AGSIST's own cash-bid feed, with the posting elevator named. It's there so the agronomic read connects to a marketing decision — what the ground can grow, and what it's worth at the nearest point of sale today.

Field Scout is national. Soil and crop-history coverage follow the underlying USDA datasets — SSURGO soil survey and the Cropland Data Layer — which blanket the cropland regions of the country. A few areas in the mountain West and parts of Alaska have soil-survey gaps; if a field falls in one, the soil panel will say so plainly rather than guess.

Field Scout is available at no charge, with no login and no account. It runs on free public data from the USDA, Open-Meteo, and the US Drought Monitor, alongside AGSIST's own cash-bid feed. I built it for working US producers to use as often as they like.

Fields you save are stored only in your own browser on the device you're using — not on any server. Clearing your browser data removes them. Field Scout doesn't require an account and isn't tracking which fields you look at against your name. Questions? Reach me at sig@farmers1st.com.

NDVI runs from about 0 (bare soil) to about 0.9 (dense, healthy canopy). For corn and soybeans, readings climb through the vegetative stages and typically sit above 0.7 at full canopy; a mid-season reading below roughly 0.5 on a field that should be closed is worth a scout. But the most reliable comparison isn't a universal threshold — it's the field against its own multi-year normal for the same date, which Field Scout computes per field, because crop, stage, and region all move the number.

NDRE is a red-edge index tied to chlorophyll. Its value is timing: red-edge light keeps discriminating after NDVI saturates over a closed canopy, so a fading NDRE while NDVI holds is the satellite pattern of chlorophyll thinning — often a nitrogen shortfall. It points, it doesn't diagnose: a tissue or soil nitrate test confirms it either way. Field Scout raises the flag while there's still time to sidedress.

Yes — that's one of its best uses. Drawing a parcel shows you its soil classes and productivity index, average slope, ten years of what actually grew there from the satellite record (the fastest rotation-compliance check there is), drought and hail history, and the nearest cash bids. The printable field report puts it all on one page for the file. It's public survey data, so treat it as due-diligence context alongside a walk of the ground — not an appraisal.