🚀 Today, we’re announcing a big milestone for Soil Benchmark
✨ 10% of English farmland now uses our platform ✨
🎉 To celebrate, we’re offering 10% off all week.
It's free to get started and add farms: plan.soilbenchmark.com👉 Please share if you know a farmer or agronomist who’d benefit!
This feels like a good moment to pause and pinch ourselves at how far we’ve come. Today, we help agronomists create soil, manure & nutrient management plans — simply, intuitively, and in one place.
But Benjamin Butler and I started nearly three years ago with a pretty woolly idea: could we make soil data more useful for farmers? We weren’t even sure what the product would be 😬 🤦♂️. But with backing from Innovate UK, DEFRA, and Geovation — plus some very patient pilot farmers — we got started.
✅ Long days in farm offices transcribing old soil samples ☕
✅ Coding up ropey demo sites 👨💻
We started out thinking we were building for farmers, but soon learned agronomists were really our core user base.
Then when the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) launched and ten agronomists in a row called to say Soil Management Plans would be a nightmare to do manually, we dropped everything to solve that. Henry joined and in November 2023 we launched Soil Sage: still the only automated system for creating Soil Management Plans.
As more and more users came on board, they started telling us about other things they wanted us to fix. We’d earned the privilege of them telling us their problems — and they basically wrote our roadmap of new products for us.
Sabrina joined, and within a year of launching, we had reached 5% of English farmland — and raised an oversubscribed seed round with 8 of 9 investors being farmers who’d seen this roadmap and wanted it built.
Since then:💪 Grace, Richard, and Chandrasekhar joined to speed up delivery
💩 Manure Maestro released three months ago🧪 Nutrient Navigator now live in beta
🚜 Fourth product launching this August — stay tuned
The recent pausing of the Sustainable Farming Incentive has only reconfirmed that diversifying our offering beyond just SFI Soil Management Plans has also been the right move for the long term. (That said there are still 25,500 live SFI agreements including SAM1).
Our users are asking for an independent, map-based, one-stop-shop agronomy platform — simple, intuitive, and not owned by a company they feel uncomfortable about.
That’s what we’re building.
And so today we proudly have:
🏴 915,318 hectares — that’s 10.4% of England’s 8.8m ha of farmland
🧑🌾 40% of our 3,755 farms have upgraded to premium plans
We’re proud to have reached 10% of English farmland. Now for the other 90%.
