About the site
County-level lawn care data, written in plain language.
LawnByCounty is independently published data journalism. We present the climate, soil, and drought data that federal agencies already collect — USDA hardiness zones, NOAA climate normals, US Drought Monitor — for every one of America’s 3,144 counties, so you can choose the right grass and care schedule for your actual growing conditions.
What LawnByCounty Is
LawnByCounty is a data-journalism site, not a landscaping service or agronomy consultancy. Our purpose is to take county-level climate and soil data published by the federal government and present it in a form a regular homeowner can actually compare and act on. If you are deciding what grass to plant, when to seed, or how much irrigation your county typically needs, this site is built for you.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map, NOAA Climate Normals (1991-2020), USDA SSURGO soil data, and the US Drought Monitor. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology — including the formula we use to compute lawn difficulty scores — is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs LawnByCounty
LawnByCounty is published and edited by Evan Brooks, Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to ingest public datasets, then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.
The data editor documents the methodology for composite scores and rankings across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. The data editor is the named editorial owner of this site: published statistics either match the source data or they are corrected.
The data editor is not a licensed agronomist, turfgrass scientist, or landscape contractor, and LawnByCounty does not present itself as professional lawn-care advice. We do not diagnose lawn diseases, prescribe treatments, or guarantee results. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the numbers, respect the underlying confidence intervals, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.
Why I Built LawnByCounty
I started LawnByCounty after moving to a new climate zone and killing my lawn because the generic advice online didn’t match my county’s growing conditions. The USDA, NOAA, and other agencies publish extraordinary data — hardiness zones, frost dates, growing degree days, precipitation patterns — but it is buried in spreadsheets and technical reports. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, what grass grows best in their county, when to seed, and how difficult their local conditions are — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, health, schools, environmental risk. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site’s editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry a “Last reviewed” date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
LawnByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the USDA, NOAA, National Drought Mitigation Center, or any government agency. We use their public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to a state agricultural extension office or to the USDA PLANTS database — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, treatment recommendations, and unsourced inference. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google’s policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a YMYL site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.
Part of the ByCounty Network
LawnByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network’s flagship hub, which combines every vertical’s data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@lawnbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
This page was last reviewed on by Evan Brooks, Data Editor.
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