Soil degradation is being driven by unsustainable farming practices, including excessive tilling (or ploughing) and over-application of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. At this point a vicious cycle kicks in. Because of the limitations of soil testing, many farmers rely on a basic understanding of how to maximise the yield of their crops, which often means ploughing before planting seeds and excessive application of fertiliser – the same unsustainable practices driving the crisis in the first place.

But Nissen-Meyer and the Earth Rover Program are making waves with their novel method of soil health testing, based on seismology, which they have dubbed “soilsmology”.

They believe soilsmology can deliver more precise, larger-scale soil health results, faster than existing methods. With its commitment to open-source technology, the Earth Rover Program aims to make this tech affordable and accessible to smallholder farmers across the world – including those in the poorest communities – and has taken legal steps to protect this approach.

Beyond allowing farmers to better manage their soil, the Earth Rover Program has its sights set on growing the regenerative agriculture movement, with better soil knowledge lowering financial barriers to reducing the environmental impact of farming.

The Earth Rover Program aims to create a global soil database and connected app, offering near-instant insights into soil health and helping to achieve what it describes as the “Holy Grail” of farming: high crop yields with low environmental impacts.

Launched officially on World Soil Day (5 December) 2025 following a successful pilot, the origins of the Earth Rover Program go back to when journalist George Monbiot was working on his 2022 book Regenesis.

In researching sustainable food production and consumption, Monbiot says he kept encountering the same problem: a “huge knowledge deficit” about soil. “I came to see that our lack of knowledge of soil was a massive impediment to improving agriculture, because, through no fault of their own, farmers just have to rely on guesswork,” he says.

In Regenesis, Monbiot contrasted the world’s yawning knowledge gap about the surface of Earth with the Mars Rover Program: robotic missions to the red planet testing, among other things, soil and rock composition. He says: “We're spending all this money on the Mars Rover Program. We need big scientific breakthroughs, and far more attention and research, paid to [Earth’s] soil.”

At the same time, Nissen-Meyer was a geophysicist looking for an ecological application for a science which has become extremely sophisticated thanks to billions of pounds of funding from the oil and gas industry: seismology.

In a pub in Oxford, England, Monbiot and Nissen-Meyer hit upon the idea that seismology could be used to ‘see’ soil. Monbiot says: “There was this lightbulb moment. Our first thought was ‘someone’s bound to have done it’. So Tarje did a literature review and nothing came up. Our second thought was ‘then it must be rubbish’.”

Monbiot and Nissen-Meyer took their idea to Professor Simon Jeffery, an eminent soil scientist at Harper Adams University in England. Jeffery, who was so convinced he became a co-founder of the Earth Rover Program, says the potential of the idea to revolutionise soil science was immediately obvious.

Jeffery says: “We spent about half an hour on the call with me asking Tarje questions about what seismology should be able to detect. I don’t think he said ‘no’ to one of them. Some way of trying to measure structure in the field without disturbing or destroying the thing you’re looking at was an amazing idea that seemed beyond our reach until that conversation.”

With US$4m funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, further financial support from the UBS Optimus Foundation, and the addition of operations expert Katie Bradford to the founding team, the Earth Rover Program got to work. Now, with hubs in the UK, Kenya and Colombia, the team is integrating seismology with new sensor designs and AI models, and building its database, to roll out soilsmology as quickly as possible.

Making soilsmology tech affordable and accessible, even to the poorest farmers in the world, is a core principle of the Earth Rover Program’s work. Universal access to information on how to improve soil health could have widespread benefits, increasing farmers’ incomes, ensuring we have enough food to eat and contributing to the fight against climate breakdown.

Monbiot explains the founders specifically decided against developing the technology for commercial gain. “We could have gone down a commercial route. No one wanted to do that. We all saw the huge potential for creating positive change.”

In this context, affordable and accessible means getting the technology into farmers’ phones, says Jeffery: “The ultimate goal is for an all-singing and all-dancing app, which will hopefully be able to identify soil condition and come up with suggestions of how to improve it.”

The Earth Rover Program team made an early decision to make their technology ‘open-source’ which means a technology’s source code, blueprints or designs are publicly available. The benefit of open-source tech is that it can be modified and enhanced by the people who use it, promoting collaboration and innovation.

But just because you don’t want to exploit the commercial potential of an idea doesn’t mean someone else wouldn’t. The Earth Rover Program team were conscious of the possibility of another individual or organisation commercialising soilsmology, so they contacted law firm Hogan Lovells to work on legal protection for the concept.

Hogan Lovells intellectual property lawyer Josh Stickland was part of the team which provided pro bono advice, including advising the Earth Rover Program on possible options to protect its technology and testing methods.

Stickland and the team at Hogan Lovells further supported the Earth Rover Program by working on collaboration agreements between the initiative and Exeter and Harper Adams universities.

He says: “The whole programme really emphasised to me the importance of not-for-profit and social enterprises getting IP advice early on, particularly in a space where you think you’ve come up with something that’s amazing and technical and could revolutionise a particular field. It really matters what you put out there publicly, and that can limit your impact on what options you have going forward.”

For Dr Peter Mosongo soil health is far from an academic concern. The seeds of Mosongo’s passion for his specialist topic were planted when the crops at his family farm in western Kenya failed.

The Mosongo farm grew maize and vegetables. The family tended their fields in the way many farmers do: always ploughing and applying fertiliser before planting seeds. But after many years of productivity, the Mosongo’s crops gradually stopped growing. By mid 2009, the family’s income from the farm was greatly reduced.

The previous productivity of the Mosongo farm had funded Peter through school, and that formative incident lit a fire in him. His career has taken in a PhD in soil microbial ecology, an MSc in soil ecology and a BSc in microbiology. All that knowledge and experience has been put into practice at his family’s farm, where he has helped restore the soil's health. It has also led him to the Earth Rover Program, where he is a research scientist.

The Earth Rover Program’s Kenyan hub, established in collaboration with the Centre for Ecosystem Restoration Kenya, is running seismic surveys across Kenya to test the technology and gather data from the country’s seven distinct agroclimatic zones (areas defined by similar climate, weather patterns and soil type).

Mosongo says the majority of farmers in Kenya can’t afford to conduct conventional soil analysis. Even if they could, he says, because the results take so long to come back from laboratories, the season will likely be over by the time they arrive, making the information irrelevant.

The speed at which the Earth Rover Program can scale is being frustrated by the limitations of conventional soil testing methods, says Mosongo. The data Mosongo and his team are gathering through soilsmology are being compared with samples gathered by conventional methods. But because soilsmology tech and techniques are rapidly advancing, the conventional testing methods can’t keep pace, limiting how quickly the Earth Rover Program can populate its database.

Rapidly building the database is crucial to the Earth Rover Program’s plans. The “all-singing and all-dancing app” Jeffery is aiming for will only be possible once the database is large enough, covering soil types and climatic conditions found across the world. At that point, says Monbiot, the app will become self-generating and self-improving, as more farmers use it and add to the database.

Right now, Jeffery says they have an “epic” data problem, with significantly more coming in than they can process. The Earth Rover Program’s AI engineers are designing models which can automate that process, to get the initiative over the “productivity hump” it is experiencing.

As you may imagine from an initiative which has grown from a book about sustainable food production and consumption, the Earth Rover Program specifically envisages its tools and methods will provide farmers with the information they need to make choices that will restore soil health, improve habitats and enhance natural environments — known as regenerative agriculture.

A core technique in regenerative agriculture is ‘direct drilling’, where instead of ploughing a field to prepare a seed bed, farmers plant seeds in the soil with minimal disturbance.

But, without testing soil health, farmers can’t know for sure if their fields are in a condition where direct drilling will be effective. As a result, currently many farmers experience years of reduced productivity when they begin regenerative farming, which is an obvious barrier to the growth of the movement.

“If you say to a farmer ‘there’s this great system for the environment, you’ve just got to take a financial hit for three to five years’, if they are feeling polite, they will just tell you to go away,” says Jeffery.

If the Earth Rover Program succeeds in making soilsmology universally affordable and accessible, it could go a long way to removing those barriers to regenerative farming.

The global impact of removing those barriers would be profound, emphasises Monbiot. “For too long, soil has been dark to us. The Earth Rover Program changes that,” he says. 

“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.”