The Editor's Post: Digging deep into soil health and regenerative farming

“What are you doing with that hammer?” is a question Andres Velez Gruezo has faced a lot recently. Specifically from farmers who have spotted him lying in a field, using the aforementioned hammer to hit a small metal plate. 

What he’s doing with that hammer is seismic soil health testing, as a research scientist in Colombia for the Earth Rover Program. Launched in December 2025, the initiative is pioneering what its founders have dubbed “soilsmology”. 

Managing soil health is crucial to the amount of food farms across the world can produce, as well as the fight against the climate crisis. As Earth Rover Program co-founder and journalist George Monbiot said: “Equipped with a far richer knowledge of their own soil, its qualities, health and deficiencies, farmers can reduce environmental harm while sustaining or enhancing their yields. Then we can feed the world without devouring the planet.”

Conventional soil health testing involves digging up samples. It is an expensive, lengthy process and destructive to the very field you want to test. Through soilsmology, the Earth Rover Program’s scientists say they can deliver more precise data, quicker and cheaper, without disrupting the soil. 

Both Velez and his colleague in Kenya, Dr Peter Mosongo, told me once they’ve explained what they are doing with their hammers, they get a very enthusiastic response from farmers. The Earth Rover Program’s ultimate goal is to produce an app, affordable to farmers across the world, which can conduct tests and make immediate recommendations on how to manage soil health. 

I dug deep into the Earth Rover Program’s work for the latest immersive feature in our Earth Fixers series, published this week in partnership with law firm Hogan Lovells. Coincidentally, I have a close connection to the farming practices championed by the Earth Rover Program. 

My sister, Hannah Lamb, runs an eight-acre farm in South Yorkshire, selling produce as Yorkshire Edible Flowers, as well as veg boxes locally. She focuses on maximising crop yields and improving soil health while minimising environmental impacts. 

She's also on the board of Community Supported Agriculture UK, a network organisation promoting local residents becoming “members” of farms by buying a subscription or “share” in a farm’s harvest, providing farmers with upfront capital in exchange for regular, fresh, seasonal produce.

Seeing the Earth Rover Program’s work through the lens of Hannah’s farm, knowing the vast amount of work she and her husband Martin have put into the business, in the face of an increasingly harsh and unpredictable climate and the financial precarity faced by farmers across the UK, has really driven home for me how transformative the initiative could be for our food systems.

After taking a break from watering her early cabbages to read the feature, Hannah said: “Improving the soil while avoiding synthetic inputs is really important, but gathering the data to show exactly what improvements are being made on a molecular level is tricky. If we’re going to be able to help drive change on a much larger, global level, we have to know how and why these improvements are happening, and hard data is going to help make a much easier case.”

The Earth Rover Program is rapidly gathering that data, to compile a global database of soil types. We’ll keep you updated with the Earth Rover Program’s progress, to see whether it can successfully sow the seeds of a regenerative farming revolution.

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Top image: Andres Velez Gruezo, Earth Rover Program research scientist (crourtesy of the Earth Rover Program)