Property names: ProducerName, ProducerCountry, ProductionPlace, Area

The EU Information System reads four optional properties on each plot. Their names are case-sensitive, and anything else is ignored, so "pays" or "productionplace" silently carries no information.

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What the EU documentation says

The GeoJSON File Description lists the optional properties the system processes:

Any other syntactically valid property is ignored. The page lists "invalid property names (e.g. ... incorrect property keyword case: 'productionplace' instead of 'ProductionPlace')" and "invalid producer country ISO2 code" among the common errors. It also notes that "Area": "3" in quotes is read as 0.

Type I and Type II files

The EU describes two variants with the same structure. A Type I file is used through the API and at producer level in the web interface. A Type II file, imported at commodity level in the web interface, contains several producers grouped by ProducerName and ProducerCountry, and must include ProducerCountry on every feature. The system also recommends always including ProductionPlace.

Common mistakes

• Translated or local names: pays, superficie, nom_producteur, country.
• Wrong case: producerCountry, PRODUCERNAME, area.
• Country names instead of codes: "Côte d'Ivoire", "Ghana", or 3-letter codes like CIV. The value should be the 2-letter code, for example CI, GH, CM, ET, BR.
• Lower-case codes: ci instead of CI.
• Area as text or in the wrong unit; see the 4 ha rule.

How to fix it

Rename the columns in your source spreadsheet to the exact names above before converting, or rename the fields in QGIS (layer properties, Fields). Replace country names with 2-letter codes. Then open the GeoJSON in a text editor and check one feature by eye.

What the Plot File Checker does

• Recognized aliases and wrong case (pays, superficie, producer_name, productionplace and others): a warning, renamed to the official names in the fixed file.
• ProducerCountry that isn't a 2-letter code: an error, converted to the ISO 2-letter code when the country is recognizable.
• ProducerCountry missing on some plots only: a warning.
• A plot that lies outside its stated ProducerCountry: a warning, which often reveals swapped coordinates.

A minimal correct feature

{"type":"Feature",
 "properties":{"ProducerName":"Coop Example","ProducerCountry":"CI",
               "ProductionPlace":"Plot 12","Area":2.5},
 "geometry":{"type":"Point","coordinates":[-4.012345,5.312345]}}

This example is fictional. Note the exact capitalization of each name, the 2-letter country code, the number without quotes for Area, and longitude before latitude. Properties beyond these four can stay in your own records; the system ignores them, so they only add to file size.