About

Folia is a free web tool that reads a specific US property's actual terrain, climate, and soil and shows what it can realistically grow. You give it an address or trace a boundary, and it pulls elevation, LiDAR, USDA soil, NOAA climate, and state parcel data for that exact ground, scores site suitability across the three, and matches variety-by-variety considerations to what the land is like.

Why the tool exists

Every planting starts as a question about the ground. The honest answer usually lives across half a dozen government datasets that don't talk to each other, and the shortcut is to skip the ground and pick a variety from a nursery catalogue. Folia is the work of pulling those datasets together for one property at a time, so the ground gets a real say in the plan.

The guiding principle is an honest read. Folia shows sourced data and flags where a value is an estimate rather than a measured reading. If a site is challenged, the tool says so. If we don't have the coverage to answer a question on your property, the tool says that too. We would rather be useful and modest than confident and wrong.

What Folia covers today

• Six crop groups, each with its own Crop Intelligence Library: wine and table grapes, apples and pears, stone fruit, citrus, perennial flowers, and berries. Each library is many hundreds of varieties, hand-curated from university extension programs, plant registries, breeders, and nursery records.
• Site analysis across terrain (elevation, slope, aspect, cold-air pooling, sun exposure, canopy), climate (growing-degree days, frost risk, hardiness zone, chilling hours, heat stress), and soil (drainage, pH, texture, depth).
• Variety considerations matched to a specific property, with local precedent, what already grows in your region, not generic averages, and the tradeoffs spelled out.
• Parcel boundaries pulled automatically for Maryland and Virginia addresses; anywhere else in the US, you can trace a boundary yourself.

Folia is a working prototype under active development. Coverage and accuracy vary by region, and the deepest parcel and terrain data live where the tool started.

How to think about the results

Folia is decision-support, not a verdict. The word we use is considerations, not recommendations. A site score is a starting point for a sharper question: where on the property would a row actually work, what has been planted nearby that has done well, what would a soil test tell us that the county map cannot. Before you spend real money, walk the land, talk to your local cooperative extension, and get a soil test.

Who runs Folia

Folia is built by Will Sykora, a sole proprietor based in Maryland, with a background in software and a family history of growing. The email address is [email protected] and we read every note. Bug reports, feature ideas, and stories about how you used the tool on your land are all welcome.

For the legal fine print, see the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.