Following our coverage on both local BBC News and national BBC Breakfast, our research has also been featured in The Times and the Sunday Telegraph.
The study, funded by the DEFRA Farming Innovation Programme, is the first of its kind and could change the way we monitor and maintain soil health in the future. The aim of this project is to help us develop a reliable system for monitoring the activity of earthworms and other soil fauna to help farmers better understand the health of their soil. At the moment, farmers assess the numbers and diversity of earthworms by digging sample pits and extracting the worms from within. However, this method is labour intensive and costs time and money. Our method, on the other hand, simply involves placing probes within the soil that record the soil soundscape. The recording is then analysed by algorithms that compare the output to the sound library to identify the abundance, diversity and activity levels of soil fauna present.
Our Managing Director, Andrew Baker, said in The Times, “This grant will allow us to deepen the scientific evidence behind our approach and to develop a cutting-edge soil-monitoring service that promises to be a major disrupter in the soil-testing market. We anticipate that this technique can be used worldwide, anywhere where we are interested in soil health.”
With a patent pending for the innovative soil acoustic monitoring device we’ve been developing, and a healthy batch of trial farms on the books, there are some exciting times ahead for Baker Consultants and the future of food and farming.
Watch our full BBC interview here.
The Baker Consultants team is highly experienced and we are passionate about what we do. If you need advice related to ecology, surveys or conservation, then please get in touch with us via our contact form on the website, or you can call us on +44 (0)1629 593958 or email us on info@bakerconsultants.co.uk.