Production plot geolocation: what to ask suppliers for

Ask a hundred suppliers where their production plots are and you get back a hundred different things. A photograph of a hand drawn map. A screenshot of a phone showing coordinates. A spreadsheet with latitude and longitude the wrong way round. A file exported from a tool that drew a boundary crossing over itself.

Almost none of this is bad faith. It is what happens when you ask people without a geographic information system to produce geographic information. Planning for it is the difference between a programme that finishes and one still chasing at Christmas.

The five failures worth expecting

1. 01

   Reversed coordinates

   People write latitude first. The GeoJSON standard puts longitude first. A plot in Colombia lands in the Indian Ocean. Catchable when the number falls outside the valid latitude range, invisible when it does not.

2. 02

   Unclosed boundaries

   A polygon has to return to its starting point. Plenty of tools export the vertices without repeating the first one, which makes the file invalid even though the intent is obvious.

3. 03

   Self-intersecting shapes

   Points captured in the wrong order produce a boundary that crosses itself. The file opens. The area it describes is meaningless.

4. 04

   Duplicate submissions

   The same field sent twice under two references, usually because two people at the supplier answered separately and neither told the other.

5. 05

   Implausible areas

   A decimal point in the wrong place turns twelve hectares into twelve thousand. Better caught at upload than at assessment.

What checking a file actually tells you

This distinction is easy to blur and expensive to get wrong. Validating a geolocation file confirms that usable geographic information has been supplied and that it is structurally coherent. It says nothing about whether the land was deforested, whether the plot is where the supplier claims, or whether the commodity came from there at all.

Those are separate questions answered by separate means: satellite analysis, third party risk data, physical audit. A system that reports "valid" and lets the reader infer compliance is doing its user harm. The honest wording is that geolocation was received and can be read.

If your portal tells a supplier their plot is "verified", you have created a record saying something you cannot support.

Cutting the round trips

The cost is never the first request. It is the second, third and fourth, each with a week of silence in between. Anything that resolves a problem inside the first sitting is worth a great deal.

Three things help more than the rest. Validate at the moment of upload and say plainly what is wrong, in their words rather than yours. Accept more than one format, because a pasted pair of coordinates is often all a smallholder can produce and refusing it guarantees a round trip. And keep what they sent even when it fails.

That last point sounds minor and is not. A supplier who can see their failed upload sitting there with an explanation will usually fix it. A supplier whose upload vanished will insist they already sent it, and you will lose a fortnight working out who is right.