EUDR cattle geolocation — TRACES-ready, without rejections

Every establishment, geolocated

Cattle traceability means many production places — farms and pastures — per declaration. DDSpass validates each plot, standardises country codes, and checks that every establishment sits inside the declared country and on land, so a swapped coordinate doesn't put a farm in the ocean.

Why the 4-hectare polygon rule does not apply to cattle

The "over 4 ha must be a polygon" requirement comes from the definition of a plot of land in Art. 2(28), which covers the commodities grown on land — not cattle. A cattle declaration carries the geolocation of every establishment where the animals were kept, so that threshold does not decide the geometry the way it does for a coffee or cocoa plot. Send a point per establishment, or a mapped boundary where you have one — DDSpass validates either, repairs the geometry and exports one combined file or one per producer. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Several parcels, one establishment

A cattle establishment is rarely one shape. Paddocks, leased blocks and seasonal pasture sit apart and the herd moves between them. Polygon and MultiPolygon are both accepted, so a holding split across parcels can travel as one feature or several — what matters is that each carries the properties identifying it.

Those keys are a case-sensitive whitelist: ProducerName, ProducerCountry, ProductionPlace, Area. A file writing productionplace loses the value silently, and a typo in a structural key such as geomerty can break parsing outright. DDSpass repairs near-miss keys and lists each rename.

LineString and MultiLineString are not accepted geometry. A paddock traced as an open track — routine in GPS and farm-mapping exports — must become a closed ring first. DDSpass closes genuinely closed tracks and blocks open ones rather than inventing a boundary.

Country codes across a multi-supplier file

Cattle declarations often list establishments from several suppliers, and every feature needs its own ProducerCountry as a valid ISO2 code. DDSpass checks each against the full ISO2 list and maps the two common non-standard codes — UK to GB, EL to GR.

Where the country comes from on import is worth knowing before you blame the file. The top-level Import button reads ProducerCountry out of the GeoJSON; Add production place → Import GeoJSON does not. If the field arrives empty, check which button you used — explanation here.

DDSpass also tests each establishment against the real borders of the country declared for it, so a farm whose coordinates fall across the line into a neighbour is flagged on screen, not after submission.

When an establishment lands in the sea

The commonest wreck in a farm coordinate list is latitude and longitude the wrong way round. GeoJSON positions are [longitude, latitude] in WGS84 decimal degrees; a spreadsheet supplying them in reading order drops an inland ranch in the ocean, and TRACES imports it without comment. Check each establishment for:

• The position sits on land, not in open water.
• The plot falls inside the ProducerCountry declared for it.
• Coordinates are decimal degrees in [longitude, latitude] order — not metres from a projected national grid.
• Rings are closed, hold at least four positions and do not cross themselves.
• Area is a number, not text — "Area": "3" reads as 0 hectares.

None of that is caught downstream. TRACES visibly rejects exactly two things: invalid JSON syntax, and a polygon with interior rings, answered with Polygon with holes are not accepted by the system. Everything else semantically wrong is accepted in silence, so a clean import screen is not evidence of a correct declaration.

Questions

What geolocation does the EUDR need for cattle?

The location of each production place — the establishments and pastures where the cattle were kept. The "over 4 ha must be a polygon" rule in Art. 2(28) applies to plots of land for the commodities grown on land, not to cattle establishments.

Our farm boundaries came from the national cadastre as a Shapefile. Can I give that to TRACES?

No. TRACES accepts only .geojson and .json — a Shapefile, KML or Excel file cannot even be selected in its file picker. Drop the zipped Shapefile into DDSpass instead: the .prj is read, the geometry reprojected to WGS84, and GeoJSON comes back. See Shapefile to EUDR GeoJSON.

One establishment has five separate paddocks. Should that be one feature or five?

Either works, since Polygon and MultiPolygon are both accepted. A MultiPolygon keeps the holding as one production place; five features let you name each parcel in ProductionPlace. Whichever you pick, spell ProducerName and ProducerCountry identically — that pair is what the Type I export groups on.

TRACES imported our cattle file with no errors. Does that mean the declaration is correct?

Not necessarily. A clean import tells you only that the JSON parsed and no polygon had a hole. It says nothing about coordinate order, whether a location is on land, or whether two establishments cover the same ground. An area written as text imports without complaint and counts as 0 hectares.