The effect of soils and vegetation upon Landsat spectral properties was investigated for a 12,950 hectare study area. Six soil associations used for corn, small grains, and grass were analyzed for two dates during the 1974 growing season. Landsat scenes for April 19 and June 30 were studied to try to separate categoreis of agricultural land use and to assess the influence of soil association on the spectral signatures of vegetation and bare ground. The April 19 data were useful to separate cropland from grassland and to locate areas of open water. Soil differences had a more pronounced influence on the spectral properties of grassland than on cropland. The June 30 data showed that soil associations could not consistently be separated within the data of a single vegetative type; however, the results showed that soils did influence all vegetative spectral reflectances to some degree. Because soils did influence vegetative spectral reflectance, a generalized training set containing data points from each of the six soil associations was used to separate four categories of agricultural land use in the 12,950 hectare test area. An accuracy of about 94 percent was obtained. /Author/