



Rooted in Agriculture,
Grounded in Science
Tom and Ben came together in early 2022 to start Soil Benchmark. But our story goes back much further.
Hectares of land using Soil Benchmark
Soil Management Plans created
Our story

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. After that, the data was often left to gather dust. The questions farmers kept 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?'.

Meanwhile, Ben was a Digital Soil Scientist at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, building algorithms and web apps to analyse large soil datasets and surveying soils across Scotland. Passionate about the role of sustainable soil management in tackling major environmental challenges, Ben wanted to use his skills to reverse the long-term declines in soil health in agriculture.
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So Tom and Ben started Soil Benchmark to make this vision real. Their goal was to harness the huge amount of underutilised data from both farms and public bodies 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 and some very patient pilot famers! We went live in November 2023 offering quick soil management plans, and farmers and advisors now use our platform on thousands of farms covering more than 1.2 million hectares (about 13% of England's farmland!).
We've been backed by DEFRA, Ordnance Survey, the European Space Agency, The University of Edinburgh, independent agronomists and far-sighted investors who've supported us on this journey so far.

As demand has grown, we’ve expanded the team. Henry joined early on, bringing a whole load of development experience, and then Sabrina — a qualified NHS doctor — swapped looking after patients for writing code to help look after soils. After our seed round in late 2024 (in which 8 of the 9 investors were farmer customers) we welcomed Grace, Richard and Chandra.
Grace and Chandra were a key part of the journey at a crucial stage — before heading off on new adventures to the US and Finland respectively in late 2025. And at the start of 2026 we added even more dev firepower with Saachi and Amalia both joining the team.

You may notice we don’t have a sales team — we’re mostly developers. That’s deliberate. We try to run a simple virtuous circle: keep the team close to users, ship improvements in days and weeks (not months and years), and rely on users loving the product and referring us to their friends to grow. Luckily it seems to be working! 😅
So if you’ve got a question, found a bug, or have a suggestion, hit the green chat button in the corner and you’ll be talking to the people who build Soil Benchmark. We lean into the fact that we're not agronomists ourselves, so everything we build comes from what our users ask us to prioritise.





This feedback loop has led to rapid product advances in the last 2 ½ years. Starting with soil management plans, we quickly expanded into manure spreading maps, then full manure and nutrient management plans, and we’ve now added spray recommendations as well. Next up will be an easy mobile app, better collaboration, variable-rate, and richer financial analytics.
We’re really proud of what we’ve built over the last couple of years, and of how many farms across the UK now use the platform. But we’re just getting started. We’re on a mission to deliver useful farm software on 100 million hectares worldwide. Join us on the journey.

Our team

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