Humanity has a startling lack of knowledge about the ground beneath our feet. Conventional soil health testing is expensive and slow, produces only limited results, while damaging the very field being tested.
This isn’t just a problem for farmers desperate to get the best yield from their fields to make ends meet. The world is facing a severe soil crisis, with scientists estimating more than 75% of Earth's land areas are already “degraded”: that means they are in such bad health that the soil’s ability to support plants, animals and ecosystems is limited. This figure is projected to rise to 90% by 2050.
This widespread degradation is a significant threat to the world’s ability to grow enough food. Scientists believe that by 2050 crop production in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa could have halved. Soil degradation isn’t just driving a food crisis. Less fertile land is unable to support biodiversity and loses its capacity to store carbon dioxide.
But a new initiative called the Earth Rover Program is making waves with its novel method of soil health testing, based on seismology, which its founders have dubbed “soilsmology”. They believe soilsmology can deliver more precise, larger-scale soil health results, faster than existing methods.
The Earth Rover Program is now using tech the scientists have designed themselves, called a LOMBox, containing sensors developed by the Bratislavan electronic music scene.
Using three LOMBoxes, the team in the UK tested the soil health of a one-hectare site to a 20-centimetre resolution. The tests took the team two weeks. If tested by conventional soil sampling methods, it would have taken roughly two years and cost approximately £2m, while completely destroying the field.
The initiative is now working on soilsmology through micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensors, commonly found in smartphones to detect movement, sound and orientation (controlling, for example, screen rotation).
The necessity of lightweight tech is illustrated by the Earth Rover Program’s Colombia hub, run in partnership with Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.
There, research scientists Ándres Felipe Vélez Gruezo and Maure Santiago Figueroa Lopez are testing soil across the country’s diverse range of conditions and altitudes, importantly including tropical climates like rainforests and arid zones.
But those deliberately chosen conditions present some significant challenges for testing, not least the extremely steep slopes that come with altitude and tropical rainfall. Clearly, the lighter the tech, the easier it is to gather data from more extreme locations.
The Earth Rover Program aims to create a global soil database and connected app, offering near-instant insights into soil health. Read the latest article in our Earth Fixers series to find our more: https://lnkd.in/ediN69YF
Hogan Lovells – HL BaSE | Tarje N.
