Land — offering ground for a future crop

A land parcel is an operator saying: "I have this field, it can grow these crops, and it is free for these seasons."

It is the earliest thing on the platform. Supply is a harvest you will have — the crop is chosen, the tonnage is known, the window is a date range. A parcel is a harvest with no crop chosen yet: the buyer and the grower decide together what goes into the ground. That is why land sits beside supply and demand in the sidebar rather than inside either of them.

Only producers and processors can offer land, and only once their organization is approved.

Why this exists

Two of the eight ways to trade on OnlyTons are about land rather than goods:

• Making land available. You publish a parcel and its agronomic sheet, and buyers can see there is ground available for next season.
• Planning a purchase of a future production. A buyer reads your sheet and proposes a crop: "40 t of chickpeas, harvested next September." That proposal goes to OnlyTons, not to you directly — see Requests.

Everything else on the platform starts after somebody has decided what to grow. This starts before.

The agronomic sheet

From Land → Add a parcel you fill in one page. Almost all of it is optional: a grower with no soil analysis is still offering real land, and refusing the listing would exclude exactly the smallholders this platform is for.

About the place

• Your name for this parcel — "Contrada Lamacoppa, lotto 3". Only you and OnlyTons ever see this. See What travels and what does not.
• Public description — the one description buyers read.
• Region, province, cadastral reference — the cadastral reference is for OnlyTons only.
• Location — a pin. See How location is shown.
• Surface in hectares.

About the ground

• Altitude, slope (flat / gentle / moderate / steep), aspect (N…NW, or flat).
• Irrigation — rainfed, drip, sprinkler, flood or none, plus the source.
• Soil — texture, pH, organic matter %.
• Organic status — conventional, in conversion (year 1, 2 or 3), or organic, plus the date it qualifies. This is a property of the ground, not of your company: a parcel can be in its second conversion year while your farm holds a perfectly valid certificate for other land. A buyer planning a forward organic crop needs to know when this field will qualify.
• Rotation history — what you grew here, by year.

Crops it can grow. A list, drawn from the OnlyTons catalogue, with how strong the claim is:

You can also record a typical yield in t/ha and the last year you grew it.

A buyer may still propose a crop that is not on your list — OnlyTons checks feasibility with you before anything is agreed.

Offering the land

A new parcel is a draft: only you and OnlyTons can see it. When you are ready, press Offer this land.

Three things are required before a parcel can be offered, and the sheet tells you which one is missing:

1. A surface. A forward crop cannot be priced against an unknown area.
2. A location. Without one the parcel cannot appear on the map or in the list beside it — it would be published to a screen that structurally cannot show it.
3. An availability window. Planning a season needs dates.

Everything else — soil, altitude, crops — makes the sheet better and none of it is required.

The lifecycle

Land is not consumed the way a lot of goods is: the crop comes off and the parcel is offerable again. So allocated goes back to available, and only withdrawn is final.

Not available and withdrawn are different on purpose. A buyer planning two seasons out needs to tell "not this season" apart from "gone", and pausing your own parcel works even while your organization is suspended — taking land off the market can only ever reduce activity.

Browsing land

Land → Available land shows what the market is offering, in two views of the same data:

• List (the default) — a sortable table: area, surface, window, organic status, soil, operator.
• Map — the same parcels as approximate areas.

You can filter by crop ("which land can grow chickpeas?"), by organic status, and by when you need it. A commodity's page also shows the land that can grow it, beside its availability — the two planning horizons on one screen.

Neither view is a fallback for the other. Everything on the map is in the table, with the same numbers, and there is a link straight to it above the map.

How location is shown

A parcel's position is the strongest identifier on the platform. A company name can be masked; a field boundary is the farm.

So OnlyTons never publishes a parcel's real coordinates. It snaps them to a grid before they leave the server:

The last row is live on the public site: see Land people can see without an account.

Snapping is not the same as blurring, and the difference matters. A random wobble is defeated by averaging repeated looks, and a fixed offset leaves each parcel individually trackable. Snapping makes nearby parcels land on the exact same point — two fields a few hundred metres apart become one marker with a "2" on it, and there is no way to tell them apart. That collision is what produces the privacy, not the displacement.

The map draws the cell, not a pin, and the page says how coarse it is. A sharp dot would claim a precision that is not there.

What travels and what does not

An operator name is never shown to a counterparty on any of these screens — you see a handle and an area, exactly as everywhere else. See Operator privacy.

A field name is a place name, and a place name is an address: "Contrada Lamacoppa" identifies a farm to anyone in the district. That is why there are two description fields, and why only one of them travels.

Proposing a crop

On a parcel you do not own, Propose a crop for this land opens the same request dialog every other listing has, plus the three things a parcel cannot supply on its own: the crop, the quantity and the harvest window.

You do not have to pick a crop from the parcel's own list. Proposing something the sheet does not mention is the point of the feature — OnlyTons checks with the operator whether it is feasible, without putting you in touch.

From there it is an ordinary request: it goes to OnlyTons, OnlyTons reviews it, and only then does it reach the landowner. Owning the parcel a request is about is not enough to read the request — you become a party when OnlyTons forwards it, not before.

Planned-production terms

A purchase proposal on a parcel carries a second block of terms that a proposal about goods does not need, because the goods do not exist yet and the two sides have to agree how they will come to:

All of them are optional. Whatever you leave out stays open for the negotiation.

Everything except variety is a fixed list rather than free text, and that is a privacy decision, not a convenience one: terms travel to the other side directly, without OnlyTons reading them first, so a paragraph in a terms field would be an unmoderated channel. Variety has to be free text — variety names are not a closed list — so it is checked instead: a variety carrying an email address, a telephone number, a web address, a VAT number or an IBAN is refused outright, with an explanation. Anything you want OnlyTons to pass on belongs in the message, which a person reads before it travels.

When the terms are accepted

If the terms are accepted and OnlyTons converts the request, it becomes a normal deal, with the same deal room, timeline, messaging and pipeline as any other. There is no separate negotiation surface for land.

The deal then drives the parcel:

The last row is deliberate. Land is not used up by a delivery: the crop comes off and the ground is there again next season, and a multi-season option should not end because one harvest shipped. Putting an allocated parcel back on the market is a decision you or OnlyTons make, not something a delivery note does for you.

Land people can see without an account

Offered land also appears on the public site at /explore/land, alongside public browsing of products. A visitor with no account sees:

• a table by district — how many operators offer land there (as a range), the total surface (as a range), how much of it is organic or in conversion, and the earliest month anything is free;
• the individual parcels inside those districts, each with its soil, water, aspect, altitude, organic status, availability window and candidate crops;
• a map drawing each parcel as an 11 km circle, not a pin.

What a visitor never sees: the operator, any hectare figure, your name for the parcel, your public description, your cadastral reference, or anything closer than that 11 km cell.

A district is only published once at least three different operators offer land in it. Below that, the district and every parcel in it disappear from the public site entirely — the page, the list and the sitemap. This is not a formatting rule: with one or two operators in a district, a map marker is the farm, and no amount of redaction fixes that. In a thin market the honest outcome is that the pages do not exist, and the page says so rather than looking empty.

The floor is re-checked every time, so a parcel can become public when a third operator joins its district and stop being public when one leaves.

Finding land in the finder

Since the public land pages exist, land is also in the finder — as its own Land result type, alongside products, availability and requirements.

What a parcel can be found by: its crops (in either language — "chickpeas" and "ceci" both work), its soil, its water, its aspect, its slope, its organic status, its coarse area, and its availability window.

What it can never be found by: your name for it, your notes, your cadastral reference, your irrigation source, your rotation history in your own words, its region or province, and obviously its coordinates. Those are not in the search index at all while the parcel is offered — not for another operator, and not for OnlyTons either. OnlyTons's route to a parcel by its field name is Land, which shows everything in full.

Under the hood

• Boundaries are not drawn in the browser yet. A parcel today is a pin plus a typed surface; file import (GeoJSON/KML, as exported from the fascicolo aziendale) comes next. When a boundary does exist, the surface is recomputed from it on the server rather than trusted from the form.
• The public map draws circles over a plain grid, not a street map. A street map is coming; drawing one now would suggest a precision the data does not have.