Soil-for-life Beta: Optimising Big Data to Drive Sustainable Intensification

Soil-for-Life® (SfL) drives continuous improvements in crop production/utilisation resulting in direct increases in marketable yield and operational efficiencies. SfL is underpinned by an emerging innovative interdisciplinary field ‘agri-informatics’ whereby statistics and database management techniques are used to exploit knowledge held in multiple ’big data’ sets. This 3-year project will allow the in-depth analysis and exploration of this ‘big data’ providing scientific evidence to support sustainable intensification (SI) and maintenance of soil health at a field, farm and enterprise scale. In its current state SfL can be used to predict up to 70% of the variability of marketable yield within brassica cropping systems. This project will allow SfL to be rolled out as a fully functional product to the wider PW grower base encompassing a comprehensive range of rotations. It is expected that this will act as the catalyst for the wider adoption of SfL by UK growers and drive forwards SI.