Reading rangeland, timber and house lots more honestly
9 September 2026
We have always declined to give a crop verdict on ground that is not farmland — rangeland, timber, a house lot, a marsh. We got better at telling that ground apart, and some parcels now read “not cropland” that previously carried a crop verdict — wordings like “still farmed” or “reduced vigour”. If one of those is the last thing we told you about a parcel, this entry is about your land.
Nothing happened on that land. What changed is our reading of what kind of ground it is. If your parcel is one of them, the older wording was us measuring a crop line on ground where that line does not mean much.
Your dashboard
- Parcels we cannot give a crop verdict for now show the dog. They used to show no dog at all — which was most parcels, for most people. They now show it sitting: watching, but making no claim about whether the land changed. A parcel we have not checked yet still shows no dog, because we have nothing to report about it yet.
- The same ground drawn twice is easier to spot. If two of your parcels cover the same land, both rows now say so, and both link to each other — whether or not you are currently watching them. Before, the warning only appeared once you were watching both, which is after the point it would have been useful.
Alerts
- A quiet spell at one of our data sources is no longer reported as a change to your land. We check independent land-use records alongside the satellite imagery. When those records were briefly unreachable, it was possible for a parcel to be re-read as though it were farmland again, and for that to reach you as though something had happened. Leaving “not cropland” now takes a real answer saying so, rather than the absence of one — which takes effect on a parcel from its first check after this change.
- We would rather say nothing than say something we cannot stand behind. A verdict our own engine does not recognise now stops the email outright instead of being described in general terms.
The mechanisms behind “we don't cry wolf” — peak-of-season comparison and the second check a week later — are unchanged, and the evidence for them is on how we avoid false alarms.