Why connecting soil data will underpin the next generation of agricultural technology

Simone Sala, Executive Director, Varda Foundation

If any summer has illustrated the extent to which healthy soils are critical to agricultural productivity, food security and climate resilience, it’s this one. Farmers across Europe have been facing an unprecedented crisis. A succession of intense heatwaves and droughts has reinforced the need for innovative solutions to help improve soil resilience while also maximising healthy harvests when the conditions are ripe.

 Data plays a crucial role in understanding the current condition of soils and how they are changing. In turn, this enables farmers to understand how to manage them better through regenerative practices. Producing this data isn’t an issue. As well as farmers, researchers, scientists, universities, agribusinesses and governments all publish valuable information on soils every year.

 The problem is that soil data is fragmented across organisations and borders, and often stored in various formats, which makes it difficult to compare, and in some cases, inaccessible to the people and organisations who need it. What the industry needs to build is a way of both managing data locally and establishing a global interoperable system that empowers organisations to collaborate without compromising data sovereignty. Getting this right could also provide the foundation for new agricultural technologies that draw on a much richer picture of the world’s soils. And a new programme in Africa is demonstrating how this is possible.

 The importance of better soil intelligence

 Healthy soils are the foundation of resilient agricultural systems and reliable supply chains. They’re also essential for wider climate efforts, as soil can impact water retention, erosion, drought resilience and decisions around land use. Yet the challenges are only growing.

 Even before this summer, a report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations revealed that “approximately 1.7 billion people live in areas where crop yields are falling because of human-induced land degradation”. It also showed, however, that enough production to feed an extra 154 million people a year could be achieved by “reversing just 10 percent of human-induced degradation on existing croplands”. And this reversal could be accomplished by using regenerative farming practices like crop rotations to preserve soil health.

 But how can better soil intelligence help to reshape farming practices to improve soil health, food security and climate resilience?

 If you can monitor variations of soil properties over time and space, such as the amount of carbon sequestered by soil in a given field and how this compares to other regions, you can begin to understand how and why certain practices and conditions lead to greater sequestration. But finding these connections depends on connecting soil data, and that depends on getting the infrastructure right.

A federated infrastructure

 What is needed is a federated architecture: a network of independent nodes, each managed locally and under the control of its host organisation, connected through common protocols that allow data to be discovered across the network. Farmers and companies, for example, can upload local soil data that helps to monitor carbon, degradation and the impact of regenerative practices. The more of this soil information that can be compared, the better the sector can monitor the wider ecosystem and form restoration strategies.

 Organisations can make their data publicly available or keep it private and grant access upon request, and this is a critical distinction both technically and politically: data sovereignty is the condition under which most organisations will participate at all.

Putting federated soil data into practice

 A programme in Kenya, developed in partnership with the World Bank and the Kenyan government, offers an instructive example. The goal was to make soil health data available to local innovators for the first time. The programme successfully mobilised datasets from academic institutions including ICRAF and the Wyss Academy, private sector organisations including Yara, OCP and Downforce, and a GIZ-funded national survey that was anonymised for the purpose. Commercially sensitive data could be provided under controlled access conditions.  None of these organisations were paid to participate. They contributed because they understood the value of being part of a collaborative ecosystem: credibility, peer networks, and contributing to a shared public good.

 Local startups then used this data pool to develop prototypes and models for improving soil health, demonstrating how existing data can become a foundation for new agricultural technologies when the right infrastructure and governance are in place.

Scaling across Africa and beyond

 This innovative approach is now being extended. A three-year initiative in Kenya, Ghana, Malawi and Tanzania is pioneering a new approach to soil health. The aim is to make soil health data more accessible through a network of open-source data nodes, and thereby accelerate collaboration between agribusinesses, technology providers, researchers and governments. At the same time, the countries maintain ownership and control over their own soil data.

 The rollout of such initiatives also has a key part to play in enhancing national soil health programmes through aspects like training, providing evidence for policies and aligning with wider goals like the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

 The next step is establishing interoperable standards so that federated nodes across countries and systems can communicate at scale. Two key elements are currently missing from most national efforts to build agricultural data infrastructure. The first is southward: any data infrastructure built in high-income countries must be genuinely interoperable with what is being built in the Global South, where soil degradation is most acute and the data gap is largest.

 The second is inward: the private sector has already invested significantly in soil data collection through sensing technologies, MRV platforms, agronomy services and supply chain monitoring. A public data infrastructure that ignores this will duplicate effort and fail to achieve the scale it needs. The goal is therefore to create the connective tissue between public and private efforts through a shared infrastructure layer that neither public nor private actors can build alone.

The path to global collaboration

 The climate threats facing farmers are intense, and they’re only going to get more challenging. While collective action is required across many areas, soil health is a crucial element of building and maintaining food security and contributing to climate resilience. Major investments have already been made in collecting data on soils, which is fundamental to knowing how to maintain or restore its health. Yet there is a real need to increase and improve how people access this data.

 Achieving this requires a connected, open-source network that enables both public and private organisations to upload data locally and for this data to be shared across borders. By bringing soil data into one space, akin to a public library but in a digital format, users can learn from each other and understand how regenerative practices or techniques in certain regions and conditions work, or where they don’t, and why.

 Above all, if organisations from across the world can feed into a shared infrastructure, this will provide the foundation for the next innovative agricultural technologies to be developed.