At Soilmentor, we work with a number of organisations using the app to support a variety of objectives, such as implementing soil health initiatives, overseeing data collection across multiple sites, or tracking long term project goals. With an organisational Soilmentor subscription, project teams are able to dive into individual farm contexts, compare results across multiple farms, and create different reports to visualise results. Accumulating results across a group of farms can support community engagement, and create momentum for soil health learnings!
We have recently been chatting to some of our organisational partnerships, to learn more about their projects and the ways they are supported by Soilmentor.
Yeo Valley, Tom White
Yeo Valley is an organic farm & dairy business based in Somerset, UK. Yeo Valley have an organisation account with Soilmentor, facilitating an overview of their farmer network’s soil health and regenerative transition monitoring. Read more about Yeo Valley’s regenerative farming project here.
Quorum Sense, Sam Lang
In their own words, Quorum Sense is ‘a community of farmers, growers, researchers, coaches and others committed to the creation of thriving biological and regenerative farm systems across New Zealand’. We have partnered with Quorum Sense on their ‘Catch the Rain’ project, aiming to increase soil water retention and better infiltration levels. This project aims to help farmers share their learnings and results through the Soilmentor app, as well as learn more about their individual farming contexts. Read more about this project here.
“Previously the thought of asking farmers to monitor and record their own soil health observations (and send them to us) felt extremely risky – visions of paper notes getting lost, spreadsheets accidentally deleted, farmers not ‘getting around to it’…
Soilmentor has been a game changer, creating a farmer friendly data recording option that all farmers carry around in their pocket anyway! This gave us the confidence to develop ‘Catch the Rain’ where we have over 30 farmers monitoring their own on-farm trials looking at rainfall infiltration, soil health and ground cover.
As the project lead I can see monitoring data as it is uploaded live and the fact that they have photos alongside the data means we can have meaningful discussions about their data and observations, all from my office. This helps keep costs down and support up!
The ability to customise measures for our project has also helped simplify the process for farmers in the field, reducing potential confusion or overwhelm.”
Roots To Regeneration, Clare Hill
Roots to Regeneration (R2R) program is a year-long regenerative agriculture training program which seeks to fast-track regenerative transitions and build community around regenerative farming. R2R have partnered with Soilmentor to help their students monitor their farm progression into regenerative practices. Read more about the course here.
Regenerate Outcomes, Tom Dillon
Regenerate Outcomes is an organisation supporting farmers to earn from carbon credits and environmental service payments. They offer advice through a farmer mentoring programme, which promotes and supports the transition to regenerative agriculture. Read more about the program here.
“The Soilmentor app is a great tool for helping our customer farmers keep track of day-to-day practices and observations of soil health. The app gives the farmer clues about how to interpret the signs of a functional soil and this understanding incentivises new management practices where function is lacking. Besides feeding into farm management decisions, the images and notes recorded in the field can also be used for a number of external purposes, for example supporting claims made under the Sustainable Farming Incentive, or other carbon or biodiversity projects.”
FAI Farms, Clare Langrish
FAI Farms is an organisation ‘who partners with corporations to deliver positive change to animal-based production systems’. FAI uses Soilmentor to oversee the on-the-ground changes taking place on farms supplying to these corporations.
“We have found the Soilmentor app to be an extremely valuable tool for tracking improvement and regenerative outcomes as we have transitioned towards a regenerative grazing system over the last four years. The ability to navigate back to the same location each time you sample is great and the app is super easy to use out in field, allowing you to save & sync data later on if you don’t have a signal.
We particularly like the ability to save location-specific photos in the app – this has acted like a bit of a soil history for us, as it means that we can go back and see how our pastures and soils looked when we started the transition compared to now. Overall, we would really recommend Soilmentor as a tool for any farmers out there looking to get more in tune with their soils and track progress over time.”
Why we love working with organisations
We love working with organisations because we believe in the importance of connection to the land. Soilmentor not only helps with data collection, but it also acts as a bridge to help people at all levels of the organisation feel connected to the land. This is a crucial component of widespread agricultural change; being able to access and witness the regenerative process for oneself.
Key Takeaways
- Soilmentor helps to standardise data collection and monitoring across multiple farms
- The app is simple to use for farmers in the field
- The Soilmentor org dashboard view provides visibility and communication within all levels of an organisation
- Soilmentor helps connect team members to the changes taking place on the ground and in the soil
- Soilmentor allows farmers to engage with each other’s results through the Soilmentor platform, building community and engagement
- The Soilmentor monitoring options are customisable for your specific project
- Soilmentor helps to support farmers with evidencing for schemes such as SFIs, carbon or soil monitoring projects
- Soilmentor teaches farmers to re-connect with their soil and further understand their soil biology
If you are an organisation thinking of signing up to Soilmentor, please feel free to contact us at info@vidacycle.com. We are always happy to answer any questions.
