Plans with Soil Benchmark"
On 04/02 & 20/02 we will be running introductory webinars at 12:00
Sign up using the links below:
Farm Software:
Simplified
Create your soil, nutrient, spray and SFI plans on one easy platform - with the compliance done for you
Smarter land management starts here
Practical tools for managing soil, nutrients, and manure.
Manure Management
Turn waste into a resource with better tracking and smarter planning.
Nutrient Management
Create nutrient plans that reduce input costs, avoid over-application, and improve crop performance.
Soil Management
Understand your soils, meet SFI standards, and build long-term plans tailored to your fields.
See it in action!
Soil Benchmark brings together intuitive design, trusted datasets, and simple map-based editing
to create faster, smarter plans.
As an independent, GB-wide platform, we’re already trusted on over 15% of England’s farmland -
and we're fast becoming the go-to software for farmers and advisors across Scotland and Wales as well.
Get started in 30 seconds
Create your account
Sign up with just an email address. No card details required - it's completely free to get started.
Add your farm
Use your SBI number to import field boundaries in England (or pick your fields in Wales or Scotland).
Fine tune your plan
Combine all of the automatically populated layers of environmental and compliance data with your own knowledge to finalise your plans.
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Soil Benchmark makes it quick and easy!
John Snow
Farm Hand, Winterfell
Hectares using Soil Benchmark
Farms using Soil Benchmark
Smarter land management starts here
Soil Management
Understand your soils, meet SFI standards, and build long-term plans tailored to your fields.
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Nutrient Management
Understand your soils, meet SFI standards, and build long-term plans tailored to your fields.
Manure Management
Understand your soils, meet SFI standards, and build long-term plans tailored to your fields.
Quicker, smarter
farm management software
Soil Sage
Soil plans
SFI SAM1-compliant Soil Management Plans, with all your risk maps and field-by-field management proposals auto-populated. Plus map your soil samples with our AI-importer.
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Nutrient Nerd
Nutrient plans
RB209-compliant Nutrient Management plans for both SFI NUM1 and Red Tractor audits, with Farming Rules for Water and NVZ checks built in as you go. Plus clear, comprehensive reports ready for inspections.
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Crop Rex
Spray recommendations
Quickly and easily create Spray Recommendations for pesticide applications - check they're compliant and share them between agronomist and farmer.
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SFI Shepherd
SFI26 plans
Build SFI26 applications field by field. See clashes, agreement caps and prior scheme conflicts as you go, compare drafts, and export a summary ready for the RPA portal.
Effortless
Risk maps and soil proposals come ready-made, spreadable areas auto- calculated, and compliance flagged live for RB209, NVZs & product labels.
Independent
We are completely independent. There's no need to worry about who your applications or costings data is shared with - the answer is nobody!
Trusted
Farms covering 1.3m ha have used the platform to get through thousands of inspections. Our team includes soil scientists and FACTS qualified coders!
Evolving
We build based on what users ask for, and release new features most weeks. Get in touch for live support from the actual people who make the platform.
Our happy customers
"Very easy piece of software to use. The team are all very helpful if you have a problem... and they are always asking us what we would like to see improved."
"Soil benchmark has been an absolute lifesaver... It really has been a huge asset to our business and the support from the team is outstanding."
"Easy to use, helps keep you compliant with industry standards and there are some brilliant features that allow you to get a more in-depth understanding of land! Highly recommend!"
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
Farmers & Advisors
Whether you advise lots of farms or run your own, we fit the way you work.
For farmers
- Receive and manage recommendations from your advisor
- Inspection-ready reports and plans - clear and fully compliant
- Only pay for the farms and plans you use - simple, annual pricing
For advisors
- Professional, compliant plans and recs - easy to produce quickly for lots of farms
- Share straight with your clients and track what they've actually applied
- One subscription covers all your farms - no matter the hectarage
The soil nerds building your new farm software
Our co-founders, Tom and Ben, first met through the British Society of Soil Science. They are both soil and data nerds, and started out aiming to help improve soil management - then realised how clunky existing farm software is, and how much users wanted an alternative.
Since launching in late 2023 with just quick, compliant soil plans, the platform has grown rapidly into nutrient plans, and now spray recommendations and SFI26 applications. Today we're a full UK farm management platform - offering a modern, independent alternative to the legacy incumbents that our users are switching from.
While we're proud that farmers and agronomists have trusted us with data from more than 1.3m hectares, we're 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Still got questions? Email info@soilbenchmark.com or book a call with us via Calendly.
It's super quick:
- Click here to 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. If you’re in Scotland or Wales simply upload a shapefile or select your fields from the map – no drawing round fields!
- 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 a Soil or Nutrient Management Plan or a Spray Rec. Whether it's risk maps or contours derived from the EA's LiDAR scans, water data from our partners at the Ordnance Survey, soil parent material maps from the British Geological Survey, LandIS soil maps from Cranfield, or Met Office rainfall data, we only use robust, high-quality data to pre-fill the details for your farm.
Yes! Please book a call to arrange a 30 minute demo.
Yes! If you are in Scotland or Wales the platform is also fully functional and works using the local rules in those nations.
SFI Shepherd mode is useable for farms in Scotland and Wales, but is not relevant to them given that the SFI scheme is only for farms in England.
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.
It's completely free to start using Soil Benchmark.
Without paying a penny you can add as many farms as you like, and use almost all the features of the platform. That could be viewing and editing the pre-populated risk maps, soil maps, details of waterways and sensitive areas, and auto-suggested management actions in Soil Sage mode. Or getting RB209 nutrient recommendations, planning manure or fertiliser applications, and checking NVZ compliance in Nutrient Nerd mode. Or creating - and checking the legality of - pesticide spray recommendations in Crop Rex mode. Or drafting your SFI26 application in SFI Shepherd mode.
We only charge to export or share this information outside the platform (either via our reports, or via our map snapshot feature).
SB Farm Max unlocks all four modes on a farm for £475 per farm, per cropping year. Only need one mode? Any single mode is £200 per farm, per cropping year, or £150 where one of the users on that farm has an active SB Agronomist licence.
You only pay when you are ready, and you can choose to convert any number of the farms you have loaded onto the system, for only the plans you require.
Agronomists and advisors whose clients don't want SB Farm Max can use our SB Agronomist subscription to access some core features, such as sharing spray and fertiliser recommendations, and creating basic nutrient management reports. SB Agronomist is a £500 per user, per year licence covering every farm you have access to.
See the SB Farm Max and SB Agronomist pages for full details.
