THE CLASSIFICATION OF SOILS

The system of soil classification used by the National Cooperative Soil Survey has six categories. Beginning with the broadest, these categories are the order, suborder, great group, subgroup, family, and series. Classification is based on soil properties observed in the field or inferred from those observations or from laboratory measurements. In table 1, the soils of the survey area are listed alphabetically and are classified according to the system. The categories are defined in the following paragraphs.