Agricultural lending: screen every financed farm plot before the loan is drawn
Agricultural lending finances land, and land carries designations the loan file rarely records: a sustainable-use area across the back field, a water-protection zone along the creek, a protected wetland a kilometre downstream, a community claim on the pasture. ERWAY Legality Assessment checks every financed parcel against protected areas, Indigenous and community lands, heritage and wetland designations and threatened-species records, and gives the credit analyst one outcome per parcel with the supporting record — before the facility is drawn, not after the complaint.
The parcels come in as GeoJSON with the loan or borrower reference as the identity field; a farm with eight fields is eight rows. Five checks run per parcel in the background; the outcome by source says which field overlaps a protected area and by how many hectares, which sits inside a wetland boundary, which lies on recognised Indigenous land and needs documented consent. A clean field never softens a finding on its neighbour, and a field whose checks are queued is never treated as clean. The banks and lenders page sets this inside the EBA's expectations on ESG risk; for lenders financing EUDR commodities, the Article 3(b) page shows the same parcels in the due diligence context.
Why the parcel, not the borrower
Borrower-level ESG data says what a company reports; parcel-level screening says what the financed land touches. A cooperative's thirty lots may be clean on twenty-eight and sit on a documented Indigenous title on two, and only the two matter to the file. The product counts them — plots needing community consent — and puts them on the list the analyst opens first. The land-acquisition page applies the same logic to a purchase.
What the finding looks like
'Sustainable-use area, Category VI, 2.1 ha, 22 % of the parcel — tier 3, restricted.' 'Inside a protected wetland, official boundary, 1.3 ha, 14 % — tier 3, restricted.' 'Recognised Indigenous land, title documented — tier 2, consent needed.' Each is dated to the source's last import, each links to the official record where one exists, and each travels into the CSV or GeoJSON export alongside the parcel's identity.
What remains the lender's
Title and cadastre, the valuation, the covenant and the decision. Where the country keeps its own register of protected areas and legal reserves, that register is the authority, and this is stated clearly. The screening's job is narrower and earlier: to make sure no parcel enters the book with a designation nobody looked for.