On-Farm Soil Health Measuring & Assessing Initiatives

Soil assessment is an increasingly crowded space. A large and growing number of organisations are looking to influence or prescribe how farmers measure and assess their soil.

This has the potential to lead to:

• Confusion among farmers – unsure of what approach to use, and for what purpose.
• Inconsistent data collection – for stakeholders looking to understand change and impact over time.
• Different interpretations of what a healthy soil is.

In order to address the large number of different on-farm soil health monitoring and assessment initiatives, the Soil Health and Carbon Dynamics Topic Advisory Group (Soils TAG) hosted a workshop entitled ‘On-Farm Soil Health Measuring & Assessing Initiatives Workshop’, hosted on the 13th of June 2025. The Soils TAG co-leads convened expert stakeholders to share the experiences of some of the organisations behind the different schemes, thus providing an opportunity for workshop participants to discuss the implications of this inconsistent landscape for different stakeholders, including the need and benefits of a more consistent, harmonised approach.

The workshop also presented findings from on-farm soil mesaurement and assessment research. In 2024, the Sustainable Soils Alliance (SSA) with the support of stakeholders across the sector, carried out an extensive mapping exercise of the principal initiatives used to measure and assess on-farm soil health in the UK. This research included government policies, certification schemes and carbon calculators, and revealed that, while a growing number and range of organisations (government, industry, NGOs and others) are measuring and assessing soil health for productivity, environmental, regulatory and incentivisation purposes, the approaches they use vary from one scheme to the next. In particular, it highlighted how different metrics, methodologies, thresholds and terminology are used by these organisations, generating inconsistent data and therefore different interpretations of soil health.