It is the work of property and laboratory with which INTA and the provincial organizations divided the territory into homogeneous units and described the soil of each one: what series compose it, what texture it has, what land capability, what limitations.
Scale is everything
A soil survey map 1:50.000 and a 1:500.000 are not the same information with a different zoom: they are two different surveys. In the first, one centimeter of the map is 500 meters of property; in the second, 5 kilometers. The second cannot distinguish a 40-hectare area within a paddock.
| Scale | What distinguishes | Where do we have it |
|---|---|---|
| 1:50.000 | Differences within the same property | Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Córdoba, Corrientes, Misiones, and part of Salta and Santiago del Estero |
| 1:100.000 | Differences between paddocks large | Entre Ríos, San Luis |
| 1:500.000 | Regional differences; inside a property is a single value | The entire country (1:1.000.000 in Patagonia and Cuyo) |
When a property is covered by more than one soil survey map, the report uses the most detailed one and says so. They are not mixed: adding a unit of 1:50.000 with one of 1:500.000 would give percentages that mean nothing, because the two describe the same surface with different criteria.