4 Best APIs for Soil Data in Nigeria

Ujuzi Kilimo Data is the data services layer of Ujuzi Kilimo, an East African agritech company that has built one of Africa's most comprehensive soil intelligence platforms through systematic soil sample collection and laboratory analysis across agricultural regions. The Ujuzi Kilimo Data API provides access to soil testing results, derived crop recommendations, and precision agriculture advisory services to agritech developers and agricultural service providers building farm advisory tools for African markets including Nigeria. Ujuzi Kilimo's core innovation is a soil testing and advisory system scaled for smallholder farmer economics. Traditional laboratory soil testing in Africa costs between $20-50 per sample, which is unaffordable for smallholder farmers with income levels of $1-5 per day. Ujuzi Kilimo has driven down testing costs through efficient sample collection programs, shared laboratory analysis, and spatially referenced soil databases that allow interpolation of soil properties to untested locations near tested ones. This cost reduction strategy makes soil intelligence economically viable at the smallholder scale that dominates African and Nigerian agriculture. The soil intelligence database that Ujuzi Kilimo has built through systematic sampling covers key agricultural regions with spatially referenced soil property measurements including pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, organic carbon, and soil texture. This database is continuously expanded through ongoing sampling programs and allows soil property queries for locations near sampled areas through spatial interpolation models, providing soil data coverage that extends well beyond the specific sampling locations. Crop-specific nutrient recommendations generated from Ujuzi Kilimo's advisory models combine soil nutrient status with crop nutrient requirements at different growth stages to produce fertilizer prescriptions tailored to the actual soil deficiencies at each farm location. For a Nigerian farmer growing maize on a field with measured phosphorus deficiency and adequate nitrogen, the recommendation differs from a generic NPK formula — the Ujuzi Kilimo recommendation might specify a phosphorus-heavy starter fertilizer at planting with a reduced nitrogen topdress, reflecting the actual soil condition rather than average crop requirements. pH-based lime recommendations are among the highest-value outputs of the Ujuzi Kilimo system for Nigerian agriculture. Soil acidity is a widespread and underdiagnosed constraint on Nigerian crop yields, particularly in the forest zone soils of southern and central Nigeria where leaching over long periods has depleted base cations. Many Nigerian farmers apply fertilizer to acidic soils without liming first, drastically reducing fertilizer use efficiency. Soil-specific lime rate recommendations from Ujuzi Kilimo's data can unlock latent yield potential for Nigerian farmers at relatively low cost. Integration of Ujuzi Kilimo Data into Nigerian agritech applications allows those apps to move from generic crop advisory content — one-size-fits-all recommendations that apply equally to all farmers regardless of their specific soil conditions — to location-specific, soil-informed recommendations that are more accurate and more credible to farmers who know their specific fields have specific characteristics. This customization is what turns a generic advisory app into a trusted agronomic advisor. Agricultural input companies operating in Nigeria can use Ujuzi Kilimo Data to match their product portfolio to farmer soil needs at scale. Rather than promoting the same fertilizer blend to all farmers, input companies can use soil data to recommend specific products matched to demonstrated soil deficiencies, improving farmer outcomes, building brand loyalty, and enabling more targeted marketing and distribution. For Nigerian microfinance institutions and agricultural lenders offering input credit, soil quality data from Ujuzi Kilimo provides agronomic context for loan risk assessment. A farmer with good soil quality that is currently nutrient-deficient represents good lending risk if provided with the right inputs at the right time; a farmer with structural soil problems may need different support. Integrating soil intelligence into agricultural lending decisions moves the industry toward more accurate, data-driven risk assessment.

iSDAsoil is the soil data platform developed by iSDA (International Soil and World Isric Data Centre for Africa) as part of the Africa Soil Information Service program, providing machine learning-derived soil property maps at 30-meter resolution across the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa. As the most spatially detailed and comprehensive open soil dataset available for Africa, iSDAsoil is foundational infrastructure for precision agriculture, agronomic advisory services, and agricultural research across Nigerian and African agricultural landscapes. The soil mapping methodology behind iSDAsoil combines thousands of soil profile observations collected across sub-Saharan Africa with spatially explicit environmental co-variables — terrain attributes derived from digital elevation models, climate data, vegetation index time series, parent material maps, and land cover classifications — to train random forest machine learning models that predict soil properties at unsampled locations. These models are applied at 30-meter grid resolution across the entire sub-Saharan Africa domain, generating continuous prediction surfaces for each soil property. The dataset covers 17 key soil properties at two depth intervals: 0-20cm representing the topsoil layer most critical for seedbed preparation, early-stage nutrient uptake, and soil organic matter dynamics; and 20-50cm representing the subsoil layer relevant to deep-rooted crop water and nutrient access. Having properties at both depths allows differentiated analysis of topsoil versus subsoil conditions that affect management recommendations differently. Soil pH is among the most impactful iSDAsoil variables for Nigerian agriculture. Large areas of Nigerian farmland, particularly in the humid forest zones of southern Nigeria and the derived savanna of the middle belt, have inherently acidic soils due to geological parent materials and centuries of leaching. Low pH limits phosphorus availability, inhibits microbial activity, and reduces the effectiveness of nitrogen fertilizers. iSDAsoil's pH data for Nigerian agricultural areas helps agritech advisory platforms identify fields where lime application is needed before fertilizer programs will achieve full effectiveness. Soil organic carbon (SOC) from iSDAsoil provides a spatial picture of soil health and natural fertility across Nigerian farmlands. SOC is a critical indicator of soil biological activity, water retention capacity, structural stability, and natural nitrogen supply. Nigerian soils under long-term continuous cultivation without organic matter replacement — which describes a large share of Nigeria's smallholder farmland — have depleted SOC reserves that limit both yield potential and resilience to drought stress. SOC data helps identify areas where soil health restoration through composting, cover cropping, or agroforestry would have the greatest impact. Available phosphorus from iSDAsoil is particularly actionable for Nigerian fertilizer recommendation systems. Phosphorus is one of the most commonly deficient nutrients in Nigerian soils, and phosphorus deficiency is a major yield-limiting factor for legumes, cassava, and cereals across many zones. Knowing the initial available phosphorus level at a specific farm location allows fertilizer advisories to prescribe appropriate phosphorus application rates — neither underapplying (leaving yield on the table) nor overapplying (wasting inputs and risking environmental runoff). The REST API interface provides straightforward programmatic access to iSDAsoil data: submit a latitude-longitude pair and receive JSON responses containing soil property values with uncertainty estimates for the queried location. This simple query pattern requires minimal development effort to integrate into Nigerian agritech apps — any application that can make an HTTP request can query iSDAsoil soil properties for any farm location in Nigeria and use those values to drive soil-specific recommendations. For policy applications, iSDAsoil data enables national-scale soil condition mapping for Nigeria that informs agricultural development investment priorities, fertilizer subsidy allocation, land use planning, and food security projections based on underlying soil resource quality across different Nigerian states and agroecological zones.