Case Study: USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service achieves streamlined soil and nutrient map distribution with TerraGo

NRCS - Customer Case Study

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) helps private landowners maintain productive, environmentally sound lands and relies on detailed soils, elevation, slope and hydrography data to support its national 590 nutrient management standard. The Wisconsin NRCS office struggled to present nutrient spreading restrictions and soil properties in a way that non‑GIS users—farmers, ranchers and agronomists—could easily access and interpret using the agency’s static base maps.

Partnering with Wisconsin DATCP and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Soils Department, NRCS implemented TerraGo to aggregate orthophotography, hydrography, buffer layers and normalized soils data into interactive GeoPDF maps on a public website. Since 2008 NRCS has produced and shared more than 100,000 GeoPDFs, with peak‑season usage over 3,000 visits per month, streamlining production and making vital land‑management information far more accessible; NRCS is now exploring on‑demand GeoPDF exports via a TerraGo server.

NRCS