Inside our soil lab: measuring the invisible
A teaspoon of healthy soil holds more organisms than there are people on Earth. Our lab team counts what they can, and explains why it matters.
By The Krishi team
Our soil lab sits in a converted grain store at the edge of the Ashdown estate. Every week, a few hundred samples arrive from our own fields and from partner farms, each one labelled with a field, a depth and a date.
Beyond nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium
Conventional soil tests stop at the big three nutrients. We go further: microbial biomass, fungal to bacterial ratio, aggregate stability and soil organic carbon. Together they tell us whether a field is alive, not just whether it is fed.
“We are not trying to grade the soil. We are trying to listen to it.”
Every partner farm gets the same report we use ourselves, written in plain language with three clear actions for the season ahead.
Open data
This year we are publishing anonymised results from more than four thousand samples, so researchers and other farmers can learn from them. Good farming should not be a trade secret.
