Plans with Soil Benchmark"
On 17/12 & 21/01 we will be running introductory webinars at 12:00
Sign up using the links below:
Soil Management Plans: Simplified
Quickly create Soil Management Plans that tick all the boxes for SAM1
Try it for yourself!
How much could your farm earn from SAM1?
Get started in 30 seconds
Create your account
Sign up with just an email address.
Add your farm
Use your SBI number to import field boundaries.
Fine tune your plan
Combine all of the automatically populated layers of environmental data with your own knowledge to finalise your plan.
John Snow
Farm Hand, Winterfell
Independent
Our platform is completely independent, and is guided by data from leading environmental organisations.
Smart
Our plans use nationally trusted datasets and cutting edge analysis to do the heavy lifting for you.
Affordable
It's completely free to get started on the platform; we only charge for the full Soil Management Plan (£200 per farm per year).
Easy to use
An intuitive interface which you can get used to in no time.
Looking for a Soil Management Plan Template? Look no further!
The right map layers in the right place
DEFRA requires a range of risk map layers including run-off risk, erosion risk, wind erosion risk and nitrate leaching risk. Our platform automatically provides these layers using data from the Environment Agency and British Geological Survey.
Sensitive areas identified
Our system automatically retrieves boreholes and water features within 50m of every field. It also checks whether each field overlaps with any sensitive areas (e.g. NVZs, SSSIs, Historic Battlefields and many more).
Smart proposals
Developed in close association with dozens of independent farm advisors; proposals for each field are automatically generated based on its land use, slope, soil texture and other environmental attributes.
Editable
We know you're the experts when it comes to your farms. You therefore have the power to edit proposals, risk scores, boreholes and water features to ensure your plan is accurate.
Upgrade to generate your report in minutes
All of the required information to get you through an RPA inspection is bundled into a report you can be proud of (£200 per SBI number for full reporting per year - discounted rates available for agronomists/farms looking to upgrade multiple SBIs).
Designed for Soil Management
Independent, always
We're completely independent, offering an unbiased, data-driven platform without trying to push specific products or inputs.
Adapting to meet your needs
With the agility of a start-up at our core, we rapidly adapt our platforms to suit your needs. We're proud to have developed our features in close association with farmers and advisors.
Leveraging soil science expertise
With our co-founder Ben's background as a soil scientist, our platform reflects a depth of understanding that unearths hidden value to help you manage your soils
Your data, no ifs or buts
We share your passion for improving soil health and respect your data privacy. We're not here to 'nick' your data, but to contribute to healthier soil, just like you.
Rooted in Agriculture,
Grounded in Science
Our co-founders, Tom and Ben, first met through the British Society of Soil Science. They are both soil and data nerds, who are as passionate about improving soil health as our customers.
We love working with and learning from farmers and agronomists - the original soil gurus. We see our role as helping customers to better use available data and share knowledge with each other.
While we're proud that farmers and agronomists have trusted us with data from more than 1.2 million acres, we are still a small, adaptable team and our platform is built around what our customers ask us to develop.
Tom and Ben came together in early 2022 to start Soil Benchmark. But our story goes back much further.
Tom had grown up on a small farm in North Yorkshire, and was working for a company selling bio-fertilisers to farmers. Soil samples were taken and farm data collected. But the main purpose was selling inputs to those farmers - after that the data was largely left to gather dust. The questions farmers were always asking Tom, though, were not about which inputs to buy, but 'what should I be doing to look after my soils better?' or 'what are the other farmers you work with doing?'.
At the same time Ben was a Digital Soil Scientist at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, building algorithms and web applications to analyse large collections of soil data and also surveying soils across Scotland. He had a passion for the role of sustainable soil management in overcoming the great environmental challenges of our time, and wanted to use his skills to help turn around the long term declines in soil health in agriculture.
Tom and Ben decided to start Soil Benchmark to achieve this vision. The core ambition that drove them was to harness the huge amount of underutilised data from farms and Government Organisations to shape a future where healthy soils support profitable farms delivering nutritious food, clean rivers, thriving wildlife, and carbon removal.
Soil Benchmark has come a long way since Tom and Ben launched it with that simple idea. Farmers and advisors now use our platform to support soil management on more than 1.2 million acres of UK farmland. We've been backed by DEFRA, Ordnance Survey, the European Space Agency, The University of Edinburgh, independent agronomists and far-sighted investors who support us on this journey.
We've welcomed Henry onto the team, adding a whole load of development experience and a knack of picking up new skills frighteningly quickly.
And recently Sabrina has joined us too. She's a qualified doctor who's swapped looking after patients for writing code to help look after soils.
But we are just getting started. We're on a mission to make sure data works for farmers' soils. Join us.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Still got questions? Email tom@soilbenchmark.com or book a call with us via Calendly.
It's super quick:
- Create an account - no card details required, just add your email and accept the T&Cs.
- Add an SBI number so we can extract your field boundaries.
- Sit back and relax whilst the relevant soil and environmental data for your fields is scraped from our database.
Our platform uses your field boundaries (retrieved from your SBI number) to pre-populate your farm with nearly all of the information required to complete an SFI Soil Management Plan.
Yes! Please book a call to arrange a 30 minute demo.
The background data we use to drive our platform is currently restricted to England, Scotland and Wales.
If you are a farmer or agronomist outside of Great Britain and are interested in using our tools, please book a call and we can discuss expanding our coverage to your location.
Its completely free to start using Soil Benchmark.
Without paying a penny you can add as many SBIs as you like, and see risk maps, soil maps, details of waterways and sensitive areas, as well as viewing and editing suggested management actions.
We charge customers £200 per SBI per year to download the full Soil Management Plan (which, through the SFI23 SAM1 action will earn a farmer £6 / ha, plus an additional £97. That's £1,297 for a 200ha farm).
You only pay when you are ready, and you can choose to convert any number of the SBIs you have loaded onto the system.
We can offer discounted rates for agronomy companies and large farms looking to upgrade multiple SBIs. Please book a call or get in touch if you would like to discuss this option.
Latest posts
Get your Soil Management Plan done today
Our platform brings together disparate soil sample and soil management information to allow you to see clearly, in one place, the history of your fields and how they’ve been managed.
From soil samples, to cropping histories, to the tillage practices you’ve used – we can add any information that you want to compare.
Plus we will digitise and map any paper information you upload - for free!
Our tools automatically calculate and complete details such as run-off or erosion risk, saving you time and effort. Use historic data stored on the platform to fill out other sections quickly and accurately, without having to go digging in old files or emails.
Spend less time stuck behind a screen, and more where you want to be.
By contributing your information to the platform, you unlock insights from our a growing pool of other farmers, already covering more than 115,000 acres. Learn from what has worked on comparable farms, and add your insights to help other farmers improve the health of their soils.
See for each of your fields what practices have improved soil health and farm performance on comparable fields in our database. We combine data from soil type and topography to climate and farm history to find the most relevant comparisons for you to learn from.
All our benchmarking tools work on the same principle – the more information you contribute to the platform, the more you will be able to access from other farmers and advisors.
Use our platform to extract data for each field on:
- Topography: helping you calculate run-off and erosion risk, based on the Environment Agency's newly released LIDAR data
- Geology: use layers from our partners at the British Geological Survey, cropped to your fields, including estimated soil depth and soil texture
- Soil Maps: Access the soil series data for each field from national soil maps held at Cranfield University and the James Hutton Institute
Working with our partners at the Met Office, use our platform to see the climate data for any of your fields going back 30 years. Climate data you can access through our platform includes:
- Daily or monthly temperature (maximum, minimum, mean)
- Rainfall (monthly total)
- Sunlight hours (monthly total)
- Wind speed (monthly average)
- Humidity (monthly average)
- Ground frost days
The platform allows you to identify and flag unusual spikes in any of these datasets. Compare these against farm records such as yield records or movements in soil nutrient levels.