How a Global Coffee Trader Fixes Farm Boundaries Before They Reach TRACT

Fixing GeoJSON files is one of the biggest headaches of EUDR. One of our customers, a Global Coffee Trader, sources from farms around the world. Their GIS team is responsible for ensuring that all farms are mapped in a way that will ultimately be accepted into the EU Information System. Without this, products can’t be imported.  

The GIS team works with TRACT to become submission-ready faster. They use our plugin for QGIS, the mapping software they already use every day, to convert their files into valid GeoJSON and more importantly, tell them exactly which plots fail and why so they can easily correct them.  

Many origins, one required format  

The reality of working globally is that farm boundaries reach teams in many different formats. This GIS team received shapefiles, KML files, and any other format that a local team used. For EUDR, only GeoJSON is accepted by the EU Information System. And, there are strict requirements around the formatting of that GeoJSON. However, the EU Information System provides no tooling to help teams validate their files or correct them prior to uploading.  

In addition to formatting issues, the geometry itself can be rejected for a number of reasons. Interior holes or self-intersecting boundaries will be rejected for example. This GIS team struggled with previous systems that provided generic messaging, or worse yet, no messaging at all. Managing millions of polygons, they needed a diagnosis.  

Fixing issues where they already work  

Rather than asking the team to learn a new system, TRACT built a plugin to run inside QGIS. The plugin does two things: 

First, it produces a valid file from any input and produces an importable file for TRACT. GIS teams can stay in a tool they're familiar with and import data directly to TRACT to pass off to their colleagues for deforestation analysis.  

The GIS team we worked with was able to collect data in many formats and easily create valid GeoJSON files, along with the corresponding master data records to link them directly with shipment data in TRACT. What used to take them days of work and lots of back and forth with suppliers now happens in minutes.  

Second, the plugin runs a validation check to ensure that ultimately it will be accepted into the EU Information System.  

To correct files, the plugin flags issues, including interior holes and self-intersections. Some problems can be corrected automatically, such as holes.  And it provides the team with an error report that provides a detailed diagnosis, so errors that the team corrects themselves are clear.  The trader’s GIS specialist is using this tooling every day now.

"I think it's a pretty cool plugin. It's super helpful to have this summary of the repair details and also the TRACT-importable file. We love these report details to see in which plots or in which problems we're failing the most." 

For this team, seeing trends among failures tells them where to fix the process upstream, so the same errors aren’t showing up in the next shipments. We worked with the team to train suppliers based on the errors so they had clarity on what would be accepted or not, and why. Now errors are coming in far less frequently.  

Want to know more? 

If your team spends time preparing and correcting farm boundary data, we'd love to show you how the QGIS workflow works.