National Agricultural Library

The USDA National Agricultural Library houses one of the world's largest collections devoted to agriculture and its related sciences, and operates FoodData Central, an integrated data system providing nutrient profiles for foods.

National Agricultural Library publishes 1 API contract indexed on the APIs.io network: FDC API. Tagged areas include Agriculture, Federal Government, Library, Food, and Nutrition.

The National Agricultural Library catalog on APIs.io includes 1 Spectral governance ruleset.

National Agricultural Library’s developer surface includes authentication, developer portal, and 7 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

30.6/100 thin ▬ flat Agent 21/100 agent aware Front door AI 1/6 silent saas Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-11-06 · rubric v0.27.0 · Show this score on your site →

AccessFreemiumSelf serve⚡ Free to try

1 published contract

Agriculture Federal Government Library Food Nutrition

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-11-06 · rubric v0.27.0

Composite quality — 30.6/100 · thin

Contract Quality 8.9 / 19

Developer Ergonomics 4.7 / 15

Access Clarity 3.2 / 15

Operational Transparency 0.8 / 10

Contract Governance 1.2 / 9

Discoverability 5.5 / 8

Regulatory Posture 1.8 / 15

Create-or-Update Ergonomics 0.0 / 10

Agent readiness — 21/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 10 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 7 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Pagination 5 / 5

Distinct Operations 0 / 3

MCP Tool Quality 6 / 6

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Education & Research regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created. Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet, not penalised by it.

The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

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Agent readiness — checks not met, largest first (exact, from this profile):

MCP Server +12 pts — deployment.mode + probe verdict on the mcp/ manifest, not the pointer; an unprobed slug falls back to authorship
Idempotency +9 pts — OpenAPI mutating operations declare an idempotency key — a header, a request-body property, or a named de-duplication token whose own description says so (verified); else common[].type matches /idempoten/i (documented)
Stable Error Semantics +8 pts — OpenAPI $refs a shared error schema across 4xx/5xx responses (verified), else common[].type includes ErrorCatalog / ErrorCodes / DeclineCodes
A2A Agent Card +8 pts — a2a/-a2a.yml manifest, graded on conformance.grade against A2A 1.0.0
Registration Without a Human +6 pts — a `registration_endpoint` in the served RFC 8414 / OIDC discovery document
Delegated User Identity +6 pts — a served discovery document listing authorization_code in grant_types_supported (served), else an oauth2 authorizationCode flow or openIdConnect declared in an OpenAPI (documented)

9 more unmet checks in the Agent Readiness table above.

Kin Score — facets with the most composite points still available (weight × headroom):

Access Clarity scores 21.1 — up to +15.8 composite points
Developer Ergonomics scores 31.0 — up to +13.8 composite points
Contract Quality scores 47.7 — up to +13.1 composite points

Each check links to what satisfies it. Publish the artifact, or tell us where it already lives, and the score moves on the next scoring run.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from the provider profile at artifacts.apis.io/national-agricultural-library/apis.yml: open an issue on github.com/api-evangelist/national-agricultural-library to ask a question or point us at an artifact you publish. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Markets this provider is in provisional

The Kin Score Market layer reads a provider inside its market: its position, and how deep its integrations go. Depth is only comparable within a position. Provisional and unweighted: not part of the Kin Score or agent readiness.

Market	Position	Depth	Registered MCP server	Declares compatibility
US Federal API Programs (api.data.gov, Login.gov, GSA MAS, FedRAMP)	standard	17.2 (thin)	-	-

Registered MCP server and declares compatibility are report only — not weighted. Undeclared means we found nothing we can read, so there is no number: we never infer integrations.

Standards implemented 1

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

OpenAPI

measured — observed by APIs.io (published)

APIs 1

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

National Agricultural Library FDC API

endpoints to retrieve nutrient data

Open Collections 2

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Food Data Central FDC API

OPEN COLLECTION

Food Data Central API

OPEN COLLECTION

National Agricultural Library API pricing

Not yet checked against National Agricultural Library's own pricing page. Compiled by API Evangelist on 2026-05-04; confirm before you rely on a figure. A free plan or tier is listed.

Plan	Price
Free freemium	Free
Professional paid	Free
Enterprise enterprise	—

Plan details, limits and sources →

Rate limits

Free Tier Default: 10 requests per minute
Free Tier Monthly Quota: 1000 requests per month
Professional Tier Default: 100 requests per minute

Compiled by API Evangelist, not yet checked against National Agricultural Library's documentation. All 5 limits →

Pricing Plans 1

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

National Agricultural Library Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

National Agricultural Library Rate Limits

5 limits

RATE LIMITS

Service Levels 1

Uptime the provider promises or reports, as SLA4OAI. Read from its own pages; APIs.io runs no monitors.

National Agricultural Library

SLA

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

National Agricultural Library Finops

FINOPS

Spectral Rules 1

Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs.

National Agricultural Library API Rules

62 rules · 60 errors 1 warnings 1 info

SPECTRAL

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

National Agricultural Library Authentication

apiKey · 1 scheme

SECURITY

National Agricultural Library Domain Security

TLSv1.2 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

National Agricultural Library Agentic Access

9 operations · 3 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Portal

Portal

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

AgenticAccess

AgenticAccess

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Authentication

Authentication

Operate 1

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

RateLimits

RateLimits

Commercial 2

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Plans

Plans

FinOps

FinOps

Company 2

The organization behind the API

LinkedIn

Website

Website

Source (apis.yml)

aid: national-agricultural-library
name: National Agricultural Library
description: The USDA National Agricultural Library houses one of the world's largest collections devoted to agriculture and
  its related sciences, and operates FoodData Central, an integrated data system providing nutrient profiles for foods.
type: Index
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: true
  callable_host: true
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: high
  source:
  - openapi
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: freemium
  onboarding: self-serve
  trial: false
  try_now: true
  public: false
  gated: none
  gated_source:
  - onboarding
  label: Freemium · Self-serve signup
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - plans
  - authentication
  - security
  generated: '2026-11-06'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/national-agricultural-library.png
url: https://www.nal.usda.gov/
created: '2024-11-21'
modified: '2026-05-19'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
tags:
- Agriculture
- Federal Government
- Library
- Food
- Nutrition
tags_raw:
- Agriculture
- Federal Government
- Library
- Food
- Nutrition
- Federal-Government
apis:
- aid: national-agricultural-library:national-agricultural-library-fdc-api
  name: National Agricultural Library FDC API
  description: endpoints to retrieve nutrient data
  humanURL: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-guide
  baseURL: https://api.nal.usda.gov/fdc/v1
  tags:
  - FDC
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/national-agricultural-library-fdc-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-guide
  - type: Signup
    url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/api-key-signup
common:
- type: Plans
  url: plans/national-agricultural-library-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/national-agricultural-library-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
  url: finops/national-agricultural-library-finops.yml
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/national-agricultural-library-agentic-access.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/national-agricultural-library-domain-security.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/national-agricultural-library-authentication.yml
- type: LinkedIn
  url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/national-agricultural-library
- type: Website
  url: https://www.nal.usda.gov/
- type: Portal
  url: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com

National Agricultural Library API — frequently asked questions

Does National Agricultural Library have an API?

Yes. APIs.io lists 1 API from National Agricultural Library, including National Agricultural Library FDC API.

Is there an OpenAPI specification for the National Agricultural Library API?

Yes. APIs.io indexes 1 OpenAPI specification for National Agricultural Library, each linked for download from this page.

How do I authenticate with the National Agricultural Library API?

National Agricultural Library uses bearer-token authentication (apiKey · 1 scheme). The details are profiled on APIs.io as National Agricultural Library Authentication.

How much does the National Agricultural Library API cost?

APIs.io lists 3 pricing plans for National Agricultural Library, with each plan's price, limits and inclusions under Pricing on this page.

Is the National Agricultural Library API ready for AI agents?

National Agricultural Library has a Kin Score of 30.6 out of 100 (thin) and an Agent Readiness score of 21.0 (agent-aware), scored by API Evangelist on 2026-11-06.

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get_provider_artifactsEvery artifact this provider publishes, grouped by type.
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get_provider_toolsEvery MCP tool they ship, with the operation each wraps.
get_provider_evidenceHow each part of their score was established. Free — the basis for a claim should not sit behind it.
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