Delivering data for soil sustainability

Back when I started using precision farming, what I was after was information. I wanted to challenge assumed knowledge and find out what practices were actually beneficial. The tool I used was yield mapping. It taught me that we were engaging in unnecessary cultivation and that many of my lower yielding areas were of my own making and due to compaction. These were solutions for my own farm – they are not universal truths – but specific to my farm, where the data was collected.

It was with this philosophy that we started SoilEssentials, providing data-led solutions that allows farmers to farm their land more efficiently. Soon after, we also engaged with machine control and this technology was essential in helping me reduce compaction through controlled traffic, which works for me.

However, across the world, people are talking about the yield plateaux. How we may have improved techniques, genetics etc. but yields have been relatively flat for the last 20 years. The limiting factor has been deemed to be the intangible soil health, whatever that is. If we can start to fix this, then perhaps we can break that yield plateaux.

I am extremely excited, as we have perhaps, just developed a tool that can help deliver on this.

Working in collaboration with James Hutton Limited, Scottish Agronomy, Barfoots and SRUC, with funding supported by InnovateUK, we have spent the last three years engaging in, quite possibly, the largest soil sampling research project in Europe. We are now ready to softly launch SoilBio; a soil test that measures soil health. The intangible can suddenly become tangible. What will come of it? Who knows? But, by actually having a real measure of soil health, we now have an opportunity to manage that health and know if what we have done has worked. This is an area where snake oil salesmen have prospered alongside genuine solutions. Now that the spotlight of a metric can be put on any soil management technique, we can begin to deliver on soil health.