The Land Health Credential
Proof the land is what you say it is
An independent, satellite-evidenced read of how your land is functioning, sealed so it cannot be altered and registered so it can be withdrawn. Attach it to what you sell, and anyone can check it for themselves.
The problem it solves
A farmer who has spent fifteen years rebuilding the water cycle on a piece of ground has almost no way of showing it to the person buying the lamb. They can describe their practices. They can point at a scheme that attests to a process rather than to the state of the land now. What they cannot do is hand over an independent read of the land itself and say: check it yourself.
Meanwhile the machinery for carrying exactly that information is being built into products. Digital Product Passports are mandated in the EU, and resolvable product identifiers are ordinary retail infrastructure. The container is solved. The nature field inside it is empty.
What a credential carries
For a named property and a named year, every figure satellite-evidenced and traceable to the record behind it.
The Land Health Score
1 to 9, Collapsed to Flourishing, measured against what is possible in that land's own ecoregion. A hill farm is judged against what that hill could be.
The four ecosystem processes
The water cycle, how sunlight is converted into energy, how minerals are made available, and the relationships between living things.
Trajectory
Which way the land has moved across the monitored record, not a single snapshot that weather could explain away.
Carbon
Flux and stocks, indicative, cross-checked against independent reference datasets.
Two questions a stranger can answer
Most schemes handle the first and quietly ignore the second. Both matter.
Is this the document it claims to be?
Every credential carries a fingerprint of its own contents and a signature made with a key only we hold. Alter one figure, one date or one property name and the check fails.
Anyone can run that check in their own browser. The file never leaves their device, because we keep no public register of our clients' figures.
Does EcoIntel still stand behind it?
A signature cannot answer this. A sealed document stays sealed long after its figures have been revised. So every credential carries a short code that resolves against our register to exactly one of five answers.
- Current. We issued it and we stand behind it as the current version.
- Superseded. Genuine, but a newer assessment has replaced it. Ask for the current one.
- Expired. Genuine, but past its validity date.
- Withdrawn. We issued it and have since withdrawn it. Do not rely on it.
- Not ours. No EcoIntel credential matches that reference at all.
Reissue an assessment and the old code starts saying "there is a newer version" from that moment, everywhere it has already been printed.
A live example, open to anyone
Wilder Wood Farm is our public demonstration property and the only one whose data appears publicly. Its credential is live at full disclosure. Resolve it yourself, by link, by code, or as structured data.
ecointel.io/v/wilder-wood-farm
A stable reference to the property. It always resolves to the current credential, so it stays correct after a reassessment.
Requested as software rather than by a browser, the same address returns the structured record with the complete signed credential embedded, so it can be re-verified independently without the holder sending anything. Increasingly the first reader of a product page is not a shopper but an agent working on their behalf, and those readers follow identifiers to structured records rather than reading marketing copy.
Two ways to refer to one credential
They are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one is the difference between a label that stays true and one that quietly stops resolving.
The code, for a moment in time
Ten characters, printed on the status badge and unique to that one assessment. It is what you type at the verify page, and what the badge's QR square carries.
Reassess the property and the badge gets a new code, because the badge shows a score for a particular year and is out of date anyway once that changes.
The stable reference, for the long run
A readable address for the property that always resolves to its current credential: ecointel.io/v/wilder-wood-farm.
This is the one to print on a product, store as an SKU attribute or link from a supplier page. Reassessment updates what it points to rather than invalidating it, so packaging printed today still resolves correctly in three years.
Stable references are only issued to properties publishing in full. A guessable name on a confirmation-only property would reveal that the property holds a credential at all, which is exactly what its owner chose not to publish.
Who chooses what is visible
The landowner, always. Publication is off by default. A property appears in the register only when its owner opts in, and they choose the depth.
Confirmation only
Names the property and confirms the credential is genuine and current. Nothing further. A record set this way physically does not contain the figures, so there is no setting that could accidentally reveal them, and it stays out of search results.
Full disclosure
Publishes the figures and the signed credential itself, for a landowner who wants the detail to travel with the product. This is how the demonstration property is set.
What it deliberately does not claim
The restraint is what makes the remaining claim worth printing.
- It describes the land, not the practice. "The land behind this product scores 6, Recovering, and has improved over eight years of monitoring" is a statement about a place that a stranger can re-check. "This product improves nature" is a causal claim needing a counterfactual and an attribution method that condition monitoring does not provide.
- It is not species data. The community-dynamics index is a functional proxy inferred from how vegetation behaves through the seasons, not a survey of what lives there. It is a real signal about ecological function and it is not a biodiversity metric.
- It is not assurance. A credential is indicative decision-support, and the verification-ready evidence base a formal assurance process would draw on. "Certified" and "verified" stay reserved for when such a process has actually happened.
Every EcoIntel property can have one
A credential is issued from the same assessment that produces your reports. If you already have an EcoIntel subscription, you already have the evidence base.