Cornish farmer uses robotics to help improve soil health

Malcolm Barrett is working in a group of farmers across Cornwall, alongside Innovative Farmers and Farm Net Zero, to trial methods of sowing maize that minimise ploughing. This is including using 'strip till' machinery that disturbs soil in strips rather than ploughing the whole field.

According to the Soil Association, maize needs a fine seed bed and this means heavy ploughing gives it the best chance. However this can lead to degraded and compacted soils that risk polluting rivers.

The organisation says this is a problem in the south west, where a lot of maize is grown to feed cattle. 

Since reducing the use of the plough on his farm using a variety of min till methods, Malcom has seen dramatic improvements with less flooding and more worms. 

The University of Plymouth has now partnered with the trial as part of its research into agri-tech innovations supporting land and water management. The university is developing sensors that estimate soil organic matter and moisture levels, using natural radioactivity signals that come from soil minerals. 

The research aims to show how the sensors can give the farmer a full picture of a field instantly on-site using hundreds of datapoints, rather than sending away a few soil samples to a lab, waiting for results, and then hoping those samples are representative of the whole field. 

“We're learning more about what the soil can do for us, and what we can do for the soil," Malcolm said.

"It's helping everyone by helping the environment and we're getting huge benefits on our farm too. If we can understand our soil and our crops more, we can farm smarter by targeting our approach.

Robotic dogs. (Image: Innovate Farmers/Soil Association)

"Having thousands of data points from the robotic sensors helps to build a whole picture – then we can see if there's certain areas that need attention and single out management practices that work.”

The university hope that this project will allow them to further develop the tech using other robotic platforms to explore biodiversity and crop factors as well as soil health.

They are also embarking on preliminary work using robotic dogs, which could analyse thousands of photos - taken of hedgerows and other hard-to-reach places – using AI tools to measure biodiversity.

Professor Will Blake, director of the Sustainable Earth Institute at the University of Plymouth, said: “This trial has meant we can get our science out of the lab and test it in a real-world setting, feeding back into other research programmes we're working on.

"In this field lab, we're using robotics to deploy soil assessment solutions that the world could take on.

"It’s great to be working with real farms – codesigning research questions with farmers is really important as it makes the technology we develop genuinely useful.”