HiRes-Soils: Robotic platforms for high resolution maps of soil carbon and GHG emissions

In the pursuit of sustainable agriculture, farmers and policy makers are increasingly looking for innovative solutions to monitor and mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions operations. With unprecedented geospatial density and low sampling costs, HiRes-Soils develops a robotic sensor platform to directly measure and sample soil carbon as well as CO2 and N2O flux. This will drive sustainability in agriculture and create novel ecosystem service markets (e.g. carbon) with robust monitoring, reporting and verification systems. Current methods to measure soil CO2 and N2O efflux (key soil health and GHG indicators) rely on either expensive flux towers (@£200K) that measure whole fields or spot samplers (ADC\_BioScientific ACE).

Proposed in this application, novel robotic systems will dramatically reduce the cost of soil sampling, offering autonomous navigation to increase sampling density as well as tool bars to carry next generation sensing equipment (soil core retrieval, penetrometers and gas exchange systems).

This project is led by agri-robotic specialist ARWAC Ltd in collaboration with digital platform company, FARM-B and the robotics team at the University of Lincoln (UoL, sensor intergartion and testing). In **HiRes-Soils** innovative sensing equipment will be built upon a proven agri-robotic platform (ARWACv4) developed in prior IUK projects. The platform is agriculturally robust and low cost. Here we will also integrate the data acquired to Farm-B's route planning and data analytics software suite. Farm-B's platform is proven, can integrate data to wider farm management systems (YARA-X and John Deere Operations) and is GHGProtocol compliant to enable marketing of carbon credits in ecosystem service markets.

The **HiRes-Soils** autonomous sampling system will produce high resolution heat maps of soil properties, carbon, and GHG efflux, visualised for end-users through the Farm-B digital platform. Providing soil baseline data, we will test the **HiRes-Soils** platform across 30 arable farms in Defra's high profile LNFWV Biodiversity Recovery demonstration project (30 large farms across Lincolnshire). Demonstrating the platform's utility to map and track GHG fluxes through scaled regenerative agriculture and nature recovery sites (primary market).

With proof of concept demonstrated in this project (TRL7), ARWAC and FARM-B will market robotic soil sampling across the UK and beyond. The addressable market is significant, N.Ireland alone have dedicated £45M to sample all the provinces' fields (6% UK land mass) and Defra (SFI) is funding soil nutrition management for English farmers @£6/ha.