Our overarching aim is to monitor soil properties and how they change, nationally and globally. This is important because soils are the major store of terrestrial carbon that buffers climate change, and management impacts soil health, e.g. acidity, structure and nutrient delivery. Landowners and policy makers need to understand if interventions to improve soils work and need tools that enable rapid data acquisition. This proposal builds on the world leading NERC mySoil digital iphone application used by more than 50,000 people globally. mySoil provides basic soil information on an iphone and allows endusers to upload data and photos through crowd sourcing, with more than 4000 records uploaded and the past few years. In consultation with our industry partners we propose to further develop the NERC mySoil app into an industry standard, survey grade application that can collect georeferenced soil data, on and offline. Each year we fail to capture £millions of unstructured soil data which is analysed for small businesses, just 2% of which could form a substantial community resource for producing soil maps or benchmarking/comparing soil data. We will be working with the National Trust, NRM laboratories, Agricultural Industries Confederation and EU Joint Research Centre to incorporate NERC tools into their agri-environment business or monitoring and public and business outreach. Our objectives are to expand the offline capability, and develop field protocols for collecting soil information that can inform indicators of soil change. Translation into several common European languages will ensure wide accessibility. Initial data from our survey indicates that the agricultural, horticultural, conservation and education sectors are the greatest beneficiaries of information delivered through NERC digital platforms, both mySoil and the UK Soil Observatory. Our partners work with all these sectors and seek to have a tool that is freely available and can be used by both professionals and the general public. They will use their extensive resources to identify a range of end users for testing across business sectors and will help with translation. The major benefits identified from our survey of current end users are, 'increasing their knowledge and awareness of soil resources' and 'improving their outputs and processes'. This proposal focuses on improving outputs and processes by helping our partners to collect data to inform them on the state and change of soils on the lands for which they have interest. The data will support the National Trusts Land Capability assessment and the JRC/Eurostat LUCAS survey (Land Use and Coverage Area frame Survey); both of these inform policy. Moreover, companies, scientists and the public benefit from data that can be incorporated into open soil mapping projects like soilGRIDS produced by the World Soil Information Centre.

THE SARIC CHALLENGE: This translation project was directly formulated in response to a major industry challenge presented by Duncan Rose (Cawood Scientific) at the recent SARIC Sandpit Event. The challenge is to "understand why there is a poor uptake of soil analysis across the UK livestock sector and to design novel recommendation and interpretation systems for livestock farming systems". To address this, Bangor University and Rothamsted Research have teamed up with five influential industrial partner organisations (Cawood Scientific, British Grassland Society, RSK ADAS, Charlie Morgan GrassMaster Ltd & AHDB) alongside a range of associate partners (e.g. NIAB, Welsh Government, Yara-Lancrop, Farming Connect, Eurofins, SoilCares etc.). Their commitment to the project is highlighted in the numerous letters of support. NATURE OF THE PROBLEM: Soils represents a vital resource within UK livestock production systems and it is important that they are well managed to ensure the long-term economic survival of the industry. Fundamental to this is the regular testing of the soil to make sure that there are no chemical, physical or biological imbalances that either constrain production or cause environmental damage. While uptake of standard soil testing by farmers within the arable sector is high, there is compelling evidence that the opposite is true for the livestock sector. Consequently, despite encouragement from policymakers, regulators and farming organisations, numerous studies have shown that soils under livestock production in the UK are frequently sub-optimal in terms of their P and K status and soil pH, as well as soil structure. Ultimately, this lack of testing causes reductions in yields due to excess acidity, under-fertilisation and compaction, while in some cases, over-fertilisation results in wasting money on fertiliser and increasing the risk of environmental losses. This is resulting in underperforming farms and economic losses across the livestock sector. In the current era of sustainable intensification, it is essential that nutrients are used efficiently, and yield gaps are closed through simply 'getting the basics right', resulting in improved resource utilisation and farm incomes. This suggests that current strategies to promote soil testing are not working well and that new approaches are required. Looking to the future, it is also clear that the livestock sector will probably have to embrace soil-based agri-tech to retain its competitive advantage. Based on current evidence, it is likely that the adoption of these new methods of soil testing may also be very slow. A critical assessment of the barriers to adopting (i) basic soil testing, (ii) more comprehensive soil testing, and (iii) emerging technologies is therefore required. TACKLING THE ISSUE AND OUTCOMES: In response to this challenge, and together with our industrial partners, we have designed six interlinked work-packages (WP) to tackle the problem from multiple angles. Firstly, we will map the spatial and temporal trends in soil testing within the UK (WP1). Secondly, we will identify the major barriers which prevent farmers from undertaking soil testing (WP2). Thirdly, we will set up on-farm demonstrations to illustrate the benefits of soil testing in areas where adoption is poor (WP3). Looking to the future, we will also evaluate what soil-based agri-tech solutions are on the horizon and evaluate the likelihood that farmers will adopt these technologies (WP4). This information will provide the foundation for a series of participatory workshops and dissemination events with the stakeholder community to demonstrate the benefits of soil testing to grassland farmers (WP5). Lastly, we will synthesise all the information in WP1-5 to produce an industry-focused road map for promoting life-long adoption of soil testing within the livestock industry (WP6). We expect to see tangible benefits to the industry within 5 years of this project commencing.

There is no life without soil to provide food, feed, fibre and wood. Understanding how soils are changing in response to land use management, climate change, and pollution is at the forefront of environmental research to reduce degradation and deliver vital functions such as, food production, transforming and recycling waste, and storing carbon. We have identified an important market failure that results in the loss of high quality strategic soil data for industry and policy. Farmers collect soil samples every year that they have analysed in commercial laboratories, this data lacks basic location information and is generally collected through paper based systems inhibiting data flows that would stimulate new business opportunities. Therefore, we will turn farmer's soil analysis into 'smart soil data' to unlock the secrets of the soil. More than 0.5 million soil samples, collected by the farming industry every year are without location information and digitally undiscoverable. 'smart soil data' is digital, discoverable, with gps positioning and accredited laboratory analysis. By making soil data smart we can begin to address the questions for which we need big data, such as why have we reached a yield plateau, and why does yield decline follow crop rotation, is soil carbon stock declining? In order to unlock these secrets we need 'smart soil data'. MySoil sample will address this, a web and app based digital data capture system built on the tried and tested NERC iRecord platform. We will: i) build a digital data hub for owners to privately store or share industry data, making anonymized data discoverable and interoperable. ii) a web and smartphone soil sample data collection system with GPS, and iii) create anonymous digital data pipelines to interpretive benchmarking portals for industry. This will open up new markets and business opportunities for collecting and using high level anonymized, 'smart soil data'. We call our system 'mySoil-sample', which builds on our success in crowdsourcing soil data using 'mySoil' (4000+ records) and wildlife data using 'iRecord' (50,000+ records). The new data acquisition system will provide a strategic data resource that will add value to data and inform both industry and policy makers. This is now vital, as Brexit may pose a range of new challenges for farmers and agri-business to remain competitive. There has never been more need to understand how our natural resources can respond to this economic and societal challenge. We will use the power of the crowd (farming and conservation communities), combined with tried and tested NERC digital crowdsourcing data acquisition systems, both web and app based to support industry and policy.

There is no life without soil to provide food, feed, fibre and wood. Understanding how soils are changing in response to land use management, climate change, and pollution is at the forefront of environmental research to reduce degradation and deliver vital functions such as, food production, transforming and recycling waste, and storing carbon. We have identified an important market failure that results in the loss of high quality strategic soil data for industry and policy. Farmers collect soil samples every year that they have analysed in commercial laboratories, this data lacks basic location information and is generally collected through paper based systems inhibiting data flows that would stimulate new business opportunities. Therefore, we will turn farmer's soil analysis into 'smart soil data' to unlock the secrets of the soil. More than 0.5 million soil samples, collected by the farming industry every year are without location information and digitally undiscoverable. 'smart soil data' is digital, discoverable, with gps positioning and accredited laboratory analysis. By making soil data smart we can begin to address the questions for which we need big data, such as why have we reached a yield plateau, and why does yield decline follow crop rotation, is soil carbon stock declining? In order to unlock these secrets we need 'smart soil data'. MySoil sample will address this, a web and app based digital data capture system built on the tried and tested NERC iRecord platform. We will: i) build a digital data hub for owners to privately store or share industry data, making anonymized data discoverable and interoperable. ii) a web and smartphone soil sample data collection system with GPS, and iii) create anonymous digital data pipelines to interpretive benchmarking portals for industry. This will open up new markets and business opportunities for collecting and using high level anonymized, 'smart soil data'. We call our system 'mySoil-sample', which builds on our success in crowdsourcing soil data using 'mySoil' (4000+ records) and wildlife data using 'iRecord' (50,000+ records). The new data acquisition system will provide a strategic data resource that will add value to data and inform both industry and policy makers. This is now vital, as Brexit may pose a range of new challenges for farmers and agri-business to remain competitive. There has never been more need to understand how our natural resources can respond to this economic and societal challenge. We will use the power of the crowd (farming and conservation communities), combined with tried and tested NERC digital crowdsourcing data acquisition systems, both web and app based to support industry and policy.