News & Resources

DEFRA's full Window 1 breakdown is out. 7,000 applications, £9,700 average agreement, and low input grassland in 74% of them. Three charts against SFI24, and what it says about Window 2 opening on the 22nd.

Some unexpected actions like pond management 🦆 and haymaking 🦗 turned up in the top 5, so I ran a quick comparison against SFI23/24.

🐄🌾 Another £50m went into SFI26 on Friday. After the summer we've had I expect it's still going to run out very quickly. A few thoughts below on why, what to think about now, and a new SFI planning tool we've built to help.

DEFRA recently published what they paid out last year to farmers across their schemes, so time for another dig into the numbers, ahead of the main SFI re-launch in September.

Packing the car for Groundswell has given me a couple of thoughts (dangerous, I know).

In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, I once read about Jobs' belief that "if you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will." It was the thinking behind the iPhone - which Apple built knowing it would cannibalise their own best‑seller, the iPod. We're not quite Apple yet 😉, but the principle stuck: if our tools have the potential to be far better, we'd rather replace them ourselves than wait for someone else to. So we did. A couple of weeks ago, we launched the result: Nutrient Nerd.

A super first day on the Soil Benchmark stand — great to catch up with lots of our wonderful users, and to hear their excitement about this week's launch of our brand new Nutrient Nerd module. (In short, nutrient planning should now be quicker, clearer and much less fiddly.)

Good piece by Mike Abram in this week’s Farmers Weekly, comparing the main farm management software options now on the market 👀 - worth a read, and worth people making up their own minds.

Tom's take on yesterday's announcement of how the new SFI26 scheme will operate

We've been nominated as the 58th best start-up in the UK?!

Just had a quick look through the budget documents for references to farming and agriculture.

After 6,500 miles (and only one blown tyre 🚗💨), 100s of farmers 👩🌾👨🌾, 22 months, and 9 countries 🌏, I’m proud to have completed my (1) Nuffield report

We’re running three half-day workshops with Niab to make sure our nutrient-planning software actually works the way you need it to

Great news that the CS Mid-Tier will be extended - but what does it mean for the future of SFI?

Tom's take on Dieter Helm's paper outlining the big forces he thinks will be driving UK farming for the next 10 years

Last week we passed the 1 million hectare milestone — that's over 11.4% of England’s farmland now on our platform, less than two years since launch. That progress has only been possible because of the brilliant team of software developers we already have, and now we’re looking for more to join them.

At Soil Benchmark we’ve been busy building easy-to-use tools to get these jobs sorted as quickly and painlessly as possible:

Help shape the future of nutrient planning. 🔁 PLEASE SHARE with anyone who should be there