Transparent by design
How the public record is built.
What every number means, how it is computed, and what it deliberately does not claim.
Four words that matter
Observation
Something a source stated. Observations are append-only; corrections arrive as new records.
Metric
Something computed from observations. Metrics are versioned and retain the inputs used to derive them.
Prediction
A score or estimate. It is always labeled and never presented as a measurement.
Null versus zero
Zero means the source was checked and none were found. Null means the value is unknown.
Lease-rate observations
Public lease-rate values come from stored lease observations. Modeled ranges and neighboring-county values never fill a missing local observation. A page may provide development context while clearly stating that no verified local rate is available.
County development indicators
Active project counts include tracked interconnection requests attributed to the county and currently marked active. Capacity is allocated across counties when a project spans more than one, preventing double counting.
Development momentum is a 0–100 relative indicator based on active projects, allocated capacity, and recent queue activity. It is not a prediction that a landowner will receive an offer.
Agricultural baseline
The county agricultural baseline comes from USDA NASS cash-rent observations. It provides an opportunity cost for current land use. Source-suppressed values remain unavailable rather than becoming zero.
Geography resolution
Projects are assigned to counties using the strongest available evidence, in order:
- A county FIPS code published by the source.
- Coordinates that fall inside a loaded county boundary.
- An unambiguous county-name match in the reported state.
Anything unresolved enters a review queue and contributes nothing to county metrics.
Publication thresholds
| Evidence score | Page state | Public behavior |
|---|---|---|
| 60–100 | Indexable | Published and eligible for search discovery |
| 40–59 | Noindex | Published for direct research, excluded from search indexes |
| 0–39 | Unpublished | No public page |
Eligibility considers lease observations, relevant queue projects, county baseline data, historical depth, nearby infrastructure, source diversity, and verified user comparisons.
Quality is scored separately
Eligibility asks whether a page may exist. Quality asks whether it is complete and useful enough to promote heavily. The quality score considers completeness, freshness, historical depth, comparisons, source diversity, and internal links.
What the platform will not do
- Present a modeled estimate as an observed rate.
- Publish a number that cannot be traced to a stored source.
- Guess a county when source geography is ambiguous.
- Report zero when the truthful answer is unknown.
- Create a public county page merely because the county exists.