 He served as chairman of a committee of 15 people tasked with creating a more uniform system of nomenclature and classification for soils in the United States and Canada.George Coffey was the first person to publish a national soil map of the United States, which appeared in the USDA Bureau of Soils Bulletin 85 in 1912.However, it was not released as an "official" map by the Bureau as it did not conform to the prevailing soil classification concepts of the first Bureau Chief, Milton Whitney.