How to read this map
Work in progress. This map is not exhaustive. It presents the result of documented research at this release and changes as sources are added, corrected, or superseded. Every node is based on at least one public source and carries its sources and confidence class. If something is missing or wrong, use Correct in the node panel or the Corrections page.
Every circle is an operation or a company, every dashed circle a person documented as a founder, principal or public official, every square a town, an institution, an agency or an event. Color is the layer of the place: eleven lanes from citrus to the outside. Gold rings mark nodes associated with a resolved parent owner in the module's top ten ownership table for the six county 2025 roll. The ring indicates the ownership table relationship, not a claim that every associated subsidiary or operating unit individually owns top ten acreage. The BusinessFlare® GIS Heartland Agricultural Land Module is the source of record for every land figure on this map. Node size follows how connected a node is, computed on this dataset and never adjusted.
The map reads the Heartland as one agricultural economy assembled by a small number of families, companies and institutions over 140 years, held together by its towns, and now reworked by three forces at once: citrus greening turning groves into pasture, capital from outside the region turning pasture into solar and subdivisions, and a rotational vegetable economy that runs on leased rangeland and appears in no map but this one.
Lineage lays the economy out on a timeline, 1880 to 2026, each lane in its own band. Network lets the connections pull the map into clusters: the sugar complex in the Glades and the Lykes holdings are the two densest structures, the towns sit between the operations and the institutions rather than beside them, and a visible share of the region's structure routes through nodes outside it. Cities puts everything on a Florida county basemap at county scale: operations cluster on their districts, the towns are place nodes inside the districts, the freshwater wetland complexes over 2,500 acres from the National Wetlands Inventory shade the ground, and the outside clusters sit in open water off the region. 3D lets the same network settle in three dimensions. Play runs the timeline: the industry accretes around water, rail and drainage, citrus thins after 2005, and the solar and development nodes arrive as announced.
Solid lines are land, capital and people moving between operations, towns and institutions: a family founding an operation or a town, a principal or a membership, land moving by documented sale or lease, a subsidiary or a company town, an earlier operation on the same land, a related venture, a mill built by or for named growers. Dashed lines are influence, used only where an operation or institution has itself said it followed another; there are none on this release. Dotted lines are programs, permits and leases with agencies, fairs and industry events, documented agreements, and time bounded institutional roles. Land conversions carry the acreage and the year in the edge note, and an announced conversion, such as an FPL site plan entry, is coded as announced, never as completed, until the parcel roll or a completion record shows it.
Public disclosure policy. This map uses public business records, public corporate filings, property records, public calendars, public civic documents, public press coverage and public listings. It maps commercial infrastructure and documented civic activity, not endorsements, partnerships or private cultural behavior. Inclusion does not require participation, consent or approval. The map corrects factual errors promptly and considers removal requests case by case where a listing is outdated, an entity has closed, publication presents a material safety concern, or the entity is not conducting public facing commercial activity. Public commercial infrastructure is mappable; private cultural behavior is protected.
Hub regions. Every node folds into one of four agricultural districts the module defines, or into the outside clusters. The Ridge holds Highlands County with Sebring, Avon Park and Lake Placid, plus Frostproof and Fort Meade as the optional Polk extension the module reports separately. The Peace River valley holds Hardee and DeSoto counties with Wauchula, Bowling Green, Zolfo Springs and Arcadia. Okeechobee holds the town and the north shore. The Glades holds Glades and Hendry counties with Moore Haven, Clewiston and LaBelle, plus the Palm Beach County Glades communities Belle Glade, Pahokee, South Bay and Canal Point. Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay are Heartland although they sit in Palm Beach County; coastal Palm Beach County sits in the outside cluster. Outside the Heartland holds Florida entities elsewhere, folded further into outside Florida where that applies. Nodes with no recorded place sit in a place not recorded cluster. A town carries edges of its own, and every count by place uses the district.
Geography scope. Six county core: Highlands, Hardee, DeSoto, Glades, Hendry and Okeechobee. All agricultural base, ownership, concentration and parcel roll figures refer only to this core. The Heartland network map also includes the Polk extension and named Palm Beach Glades communities where documented historical, institutional or production links make them necessary. Those extensions are part of the network frame, not of the six county parcel totals. Every node carries its scope in this panel: six county core, network extension Polk, network extension Palm Beach Glades, outside the Heartland, outside Florida, or place not recorded.
The outside endpoint share. Beside degree and betweenness, every node carries one more computed figure. The outside endpoint share is the share of endpoints attached to nodes inside the region whose opposite endpoint is in an outside hub. It measures cross boundary structure in the documented graph, not trade volume, money flow, acreage, or the number of unique relationships. It is reported in this panel, in the workbook and in the reference's network metrics section, by lane and by district as well, computed on this dataset and never adjusted.
Evidence. Data are current through . Activity after that date is described as announced or scheduled, never as completed. The module is the source of record for the 2025 agricultural base of 2,324,300 acres, the acres by class, the ownership split and the announced conversions; the map states those figures as authoritative and never recomputes them. Each node carries a confidence grade and source ids in its panel: High means an official record or two independent sources; Medium means a reference entry or a single press report; Low means a detail still flagged as unverified. A node is on the map when it has at least one documented link of an edge type to another node; four resolved owners from the module's table carry no drawn relationship yet and their documented placement is the owner table itself, disclosed in Method. Persons appear only as documented founders, principals, moving executives or public officials; no owner of a small operation is named from the roll or a corporate filing alone. Superlatives are qualified. Nothing from private communications or client work is cited.
The land itself. This map draws the network; the Florida Heartland map on the BusinessFlare® GIS draws the ground. The same region at parcel scale, with the Agricultural Land Module layer, parcels by land use, ownership, age, underused and sales, business activity, job sectors, power and water use permit overlays, and 3D. The Parcel map button in the header opens it.
Sibling maps: japan.themusiccities.com · tampa.themusiccities.com · creators.businessflare.net · westdixiestudios.themusiccities.com · southdade.streeteconomics.ai · nmbasiatown.streeteconomics.com · the BusinessFlare® GIS Heartland map · the module
Downloads: PDF reference · Node and edge dataset (Excel) · data.json
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