Soilmentor support for DEFRA
Soil Management Plan
Farming in the UK and planning to create a DEFRA soil management plan in future?
Soilmentor can support you to monitor your soil health and structure, detail how an area is managed, and report problem areas.
In order to align with the UK government’s Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme (currently in its pilot phase), DEFRA requires that participating farmers and landowners submit a runoff and soil erosion risk assessment, to be updated every 2 years. This assessment can then be used in your government soil management plan.
Among other details, the assessment requires in-field monitoring of:
- Soil structure
- Earthworm numbers
- Soil compaction
- Steepness and length of slopes
- Visible signs and risk of runoff and erosion
The assessment also requires recording of problem areas where there is existing runoff or erosion, soil compaction, poor crop growth, capping, or low earthworm activity.
If you are currently part of the Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot scheme, please get in touch with us to learn more about how Soilmentor can support your audit!
In January 2022, we launched the Regen Platform – a significant update to Soilmentor. The Regen Platform brings you 10 key ‘Regen Indicators’ to monitor, with access to benchmarking and comparison to other farms. These Regen Indicators will allow you to accurately gauge the health of your soils, and their resilience against runoff and erosion. We’ll also be adding more soil tests to our standard list of tests for monitoring.
If you have any questions about Soilmentor, or any ideas about reports we could develop to support you in future – please also get in touch! We’re always interested to hear from you.
We’re already in the process of developing a clearer framework on how Soilmentor can support UK farmers to conduct their soil risk assessment – and we’re always interested to hear from you.
