Soil profile and water-retention data for your own field: texture, bedrock, field capacity

The physical soil under each station, read once per location from open soil maps: texture, stones, density, bedrock, terrain, and the water-retention profile at 5 depths that the water balance runs on. Nutrients and pH are excluded on purpose.

Catalogue entry: Soil baseline. Soil profile for a station's location, read once when it first reports its position: texture and the USDA class derived from it, depth to bedrock, stone content, bulk density, elevation and slope. Modelled at 30 m from continental soil mapping. Deliberately excludes pH, organic carbon and N/P/K — those move with liming, tillage and fertiliser, so a modelled value cannot support the decision it would be used for. Current fertility comes only from a soil test.

Questions this data answers

How much water can the soil under this station hold between field capacity and wilting point, for sizing irrigation?
What is the texture at 2 depths and how deep is bedrock, for choosing crops and root depth?
Is the field on a slope that drains or a flat that ponds, before the first rains show it?
Why does the platform not give nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium or pH for the field, and where do those come from?
How does the water-retention profile at 0 to 5 cm differ from 60 to 100 cm on this field?

On this page

Questions this data answers
What the soil profile data holds
What is excluded
What the profile is for
Sample data
Fields
Filters
The same call, three ways
Related datasets

What the soil profile data holds

1 row per station location, carrying the physical soil underneath it, read once from open soil maps the moment the station reports its position. Physical layers land at 0 to 20 and 20 to 50 cm: sand, silt and clay with the derived texture class, stone content, bulk density, plus bedrock depth, elevation and slope at the surface. On top of that sits a water-retention profile at 5 depths from 0 to 100 cm: field capacity, wilting point, saturation, coarse fragments, and available water as field capacity minus wilting point, all expressed in volume percent.

What is excluded

The same source maps also publish modelled nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, organic carbon and pH, but none of it appears here. That’s a 2016 snapshot of exactly the properties farming changes every season, so it gets excluded on purpose. Nutrients and pH on this platform come only from a soil test the farmer had done and entered on the farm record, or they’re simply absent. The rule throughout is to keep what geology fixes and drop what farming changes.

What the profile is for

Available water summed across all 5 depths, over the root depth, becomes total available water inside the water balance. For the highland profile shown on this page, about 14 vol-% of available water works out to roughly 86 mm over a 60 cm root zone. Texture governs drainage; bedrock depth governs rooting depth; both feed straight into the planting advisor’s suitability ranking. A station sited at a homestead can return an empty water profile, since built-up ground gets masked out at the source; when that happens the platform samples the surroundings instead and takes the median.

Sample data

The water-retention profile

0–5 cm

33.9 vol-% at field capacity · 13.9 available to plants

5–15 cm

33.4 vol-% at field capacity · 14.4 available to plants

15–30 cm

34.2 vol-% at field capacity · 14.4 available to plants

30–60 cm

34.4 vol-% at field capacity · 14.3 available to plants

60–100 cm

35.3 vol-% at field capacity · 14.3 available to plants

grey: below wilting point · green: water plants can use · light: air-filled at field capacity. Example profile from a highland station in the Rift Valley; wilting-point values illustrative.

Layer	Depths	What it fixes	Kept
sand, silt, clay, texture class	0–20, 20–50 cm	drainage and rooting	yes
stone content, bulk density	0–20, 20–50 cm	water storage per depth	yes
bedrock depth, elevation, slope	surface	rooting depth, terrain	yes
field capacity, wilting point, saturation, available water	0–5, 5–15, 15–30, 30–60, 60–100 cm	the water balance	yes
nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, organic carbon, pH	0–20, 20–50 cm	change every season	excluded

The excluded layers are a 2016 snapshot of properties farming changes. Nutrients and pH on this platform come from the farmer's own soil test or not at all.

Dataset idfarm.soil_baseline

Cadenceonce per location

EndpointGET /farm/soil-baseline

Key scopefarm:read

Declared fields8

Historyonce per location

Coverageyour registered station locations

StatusServed over the API

Narrowed to your own gateways and to devices approved for API exposure.

Source: iSDAsoil, iSDA Africa (CC BY 4.0); SoilGrids, ISRIC — World Soil Information (CC BY 4.0).

Fields

Field	Unit	Note
gateway_id	—
lat	°
lon	°
alt	m
properties	—	physical soil layers per depth: texture, bedrock, stones, density, terrain
water_properties	—	water-retention profile per depth, Vol-%
fetched_at	—
water_fetched_at	—

Filters

No tag filters. Narrow with start, end, fields and limit.

The same call, three ways

curl -G https://api.nuasense.com/api/nuasense/v1/farm/soil-baseline \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer nua_live_…" \
  -d start=-30d -d limit=10

Through the MCP connector the same read is the platform_dataset tool with dataset=farm.soil_baseline. Through a scheduled export it is one job with the same filters, delivered as a file. Every dataset takes the same arguments: start and end, every with agg, fields, limit up to 5,000, order, and the tags it declares.