Soil Benchmark

Farmers face an urgent crisis from the degradation of their soils. Our current system of agriculture has resulted in soils losing CO2, and damaging water quality, biodiversity, and crucially crop yields.

The current system does not inform farmers how to care for their particular soils, or reward them for doing so (e.g. new ELMS soil subsidies promote generic practices which may not always be the best solution for every field).

There is currently no way for farmers to leverage at scale the experience of comparable farms. While **arable and grassland farmers** take hundreds of thousands of soil samples every year, the analysis of them is subjective and does not allow for any comparison with other farms' data or knowledge. There is no way to find out if other relevant, comparable farms have found innovative new techniques which improve soil health.

More widely, other players in the agri-food chain, from supermarkets to regulators, do not have an easy way to measure and monitor soil health across the country. This means they cannot incentivise improvements - "what you can't measure you can't manage". While on-farm soil data is a potential solution but will remain an untapped resource, siloed on individual farms, until farmers can be incentivised to share it.

Soil Benchmark's ambition is to provide useful benchmarking and 'soil health-checks' for farmers in return for the sharing of their data. This will allow a much faster route to scale than taking new samples, which is the current method of soil benchmarking/mapping initiatives.

Key to this ambition will be the contextual data required to interpret on-farm soil data. For instance data on temperature, rainfall patterns, and underlying soil type are all key to interpreting the 'raw' soil data that farmers will provide. This project will focus on identifying and preparing the contextual datasets required to interpret farm data, bringing together the expertise and data-sets of NIAB, ADAS, and the BGS to help Soil Benchmark tackle this critical step required to execute our ambitious plans.

In addition the project will conduct detailed, quantitative customer interviews with farmers to gain more data to help guide the development of Soil Benchmark's initial product (building on existing, non-quantitative customer research which has validated the concept).

We will actively manage and mitigate unknown and known risks. Our sound practical plan demonstrates value with tangible outcomes crucial to developing our MVP - a critical step to commercialisation.