Soil-for-life Beta: Optimising Big Data to Drive Sustainable Intensification

Project information
Soil-for-Life® (SfL) drives continuous improvements in crop production/utilisation resulting in direct increases in marketable yield and operational efficiencies. SfL is underpinned by an emerging innovative interdisciplinary field ‘agri-informatics’ whereby statistics and database management techniques are used to exploit knowledge held in multiple ’big data’ sets. This 3-year project will allow the in-depth analysis and exploration of this ‘big data’ providing scientific evidence to support sustainable intensification (SI) and maintenance of soil health at a field, farm and enterprise scale. In its current state SfL can be used to predict up to 70% of the variability of marketable yield within brassica cropping systems. This project will allow SfL to be rolled out as a fully functional product to the wider PW grower base encompassing a comprehensive range of rotations. It is expected that this will act as the catalyst for the wider adoption of SfL by UK growers and drive forwards SI.
Project results: 
Project Category: Collaborative Research & Development
Project partners: 
Produce World Group Limited, Lynch Wook (Lead Participant, Participant)
Cranfield University, United Kingdom (Participant)
Project dates: 
September 2014 to August 2017
Contact
Contact project
Contact person: 
Guy Thallon (Project Manager)
Contact organisation: 
Produce World Group Limited, Lynch Wook (Lead Participant, Participant)
Funding
Funding agency: 
Innovate UK (formerly Technology Strategy Board)
Grant: 
k€151