EUDR coffee geolocation — TRACES-ready, without rejections

Smallholder data, cleaned

Coffee supply chains mean many small plots from many producers, often as points with a declared hectarage. DDSpass validates each plot, standardises country codes, and checks that plots sit inside the declared country and on land — the silent errors that cause rejected or wrong declarations.

One file per producer, or combined

Export a combined commodity file (Type II) or one file per producer (Type I) straight from the tool. Validation and on-screen fixes are free; nothing is uploaded.

Points, polygons and the 4-hectare line

A coffee plot usually arrives as one GPS waypoint — taken at the drying patio or on the path in — plus a hectare figure in a spreadsheet column. Under Art. 2(28) that is acceptable only at 4 hectares or smaller. Above 4 ha the plot must be sent as a mapped boundary; a more precise point does not help.

Two habits make this worse. A point sent with no Area is silently defaulted by TRACES to 4 hectares, so a 9 ha farm becomes a compliant-looking 4 ha one. An area typed as text — "Area": "3" rather than "Area": 3 — is read as 0 hectares. Neither shows an error.

• 4 ha or under — a point with a real, numeric area.
• Over 4 ha — a traced boundary: KML, KMZ, GPX, zipped Shapefile, or a boundary column in the spreadsheet.
• Every plot — an area that is a number, and a valid ISO2 country code.

What each coffee record must carry

TRACES reads four properties, and the key names are a case-sensitive whitelist: ProducerName, ProducerCountry, ProductionPlace, Area. An export labelling the field productionplace, or a hand-edited file carrying geomerty, loses that data silently — or fails to parse.

ProducerCountry must be a valid ISO2 code; UK and EL turn up often and belong as GB and GR. And before blaming the file for an empty country field, check where you imported: the top-level Import button reads it; Add production place → Import GeoJSON does not.

Checking a season of deliveries in one pass

A washing-station or cooperative delivery can be hundreds of member plots in one file, which nobody checks row by row. Drop it in and all are validated at once: a map preview shows where the plots really sit, every finding is tied to its plot, and the total area is there to weigh against what you bought.

Thousands of traced boundaries add up, and a DDS is capped at 25 MB. Over that, DDSpass strips redundant collinear vertices, then simplifies within a 0.5% area guard — and if it still will not fit, gives the official instructions for splitting the declaration.

What the supplier must fix comes back as a plain-language report in EN, ES, PT, FR, DE, NL or DA — read by field staff in their own language. EUDR applies to medium and large operators from 30 December 2026.

Questions

My supplier sent one GPS point per farm. Is that enough for coffee?

Only for plots of 4 hectares or less. Art. 2(28) requires anything larger to be sent as a polygon, so those plots have to come back as a mapped boundary. DDSpass checks the declared area against the geometry and flags each point over the line.

Why does my coffee DDS show 0 hectares?

Almost always because the area arrived as text rather than a number — "3" instead of 3 — which TRACES reads as 0. The file imports without complaint, so nothing tells you the declaration is understated. DDSpass retypes the value and reports it.

Can a spreadsheet carry coffee plot boundaries?

Yes. Where a column holds a WKT or GeoJSON boundary, DDSpass reads it and builds a real polygon for that row, falling back to the row's point if a cell will not parse. It is the only way a spreadsheet can satisfy the polygon requirement above 4 ha.

Can I send the cooperative's KML straight to TRACES?

No. The picker accepts only .geojson and .json; KML, KMZ, Excel, CSV, Shapefile and GPX cannot even be selected. DDSpass converts any of them in your browser and repairs what conversion alone leaves broken.