The Earth Rover Program has introduced “soilsmology”, a pioneering approach that applies seismic techniques to agriculture. By passing ultrahigh-frequency waves through topsoil and subsoil, the technology maps properties such as bulk density, soil volume, and moisture – all without the invasive sampling that disrupts soil structure.
Traditional soil analysis often relies on digging pits or extracting cores, which can damage the very ecosystem under study. Earth Rover’s non-invasive method avoids this problem, offering fast, affordable, and scalable soil health monitoring that could transform farming practices worldwide.
From proof-of-concept to global network
Launched two years ago as a bold experiment, the Earth Rover Program is now a functioning global network supported by the Bezos Earth Fund and UBS Optimus Foundation. Field tests in Europe, Africa, and South America have delivered high-resolution data down to 10 cm detail revealing how different farming practices impact soil health and enabling comparisons across ecosystems and agroecological zones.
The program’s next steps include integrating seismic mapping with AI-driven models and new sensor designs to measure connected porosity, soil texture, and carbon content – all critical metrics for sustainable agriculture.
Radical cost reduction and accessibility
One of the most striking achievements is cost reduction. Over two years, Earth Rover has cut the price of seismic sensors from $1,000 in 2023 to just $10 today, thanks to next-generation MEMS accelerometer technology. The goal is to bring costs down to $1, making soil health monitoring accessible even to the world’s poorest farmers.
This affordability hopes to open the door to a global citizen-science movement, where farmers and land managers upload soil data to a shared, encrypted platform, creating a vast, open-source database to guide decisions on fertiliser use, irrigation, and tillage.
Feeding the world without devouring the planet
Soil underpins 99% of human calories and stores more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation combined. Yet 75% of soils are degraded, threatening food security and climate stability. Crop yields could fall by up to 50% by 2050 in vulnerable regions, displacing millions if action isn’t taken.
By making soil health visible and actionable, Earth Rover aims to deliver the ‘Holy Grail’ of farming: high yields with low environmental impact. Its ERP-GPT platform aims to translate complex soil data into clear guidance for farmers and policymakers, with a long-term vision of creating soil forecasts, akin to weather reports, to guide global agricultural decisions.
Voices behind the innovation
“For too long, soil has been dark to us,” said George Monbiot, the English journalist and author and co-founder of the Earth Rover Program. “Equipped with richer knowledge of their soil, farmers can reduce environmental harm while sustaining yields.” In time, it is hoped this could enable “consistently high yielding agroecology. Then we can feed the world without devouring the planet.”
Monbiot believes it will take a few years before this technology is dispatchable to farmers on the ground. “Part of the purpose of building the database is to deliver meaningful results from a very wide range of soil types, and that takes time to accumulate,” he told AgTechNavigator. “Simultaneously, we’re working on ensuring the tech is immediately useful and intelligible, and to reduce costs to the absolute minimum. I think the minimum time before it will be generally available to farmers is around five years. We definitely need to scale up both funding and partnerships. Building out on this scale will not be cheap.”
Ensuring actionable data for farmers
A big part of the project is ensuring the data will be understood and actionable for farmers. “The hope, eventually, is that – assuming, as we expect, that we can make use of the accelerometers in phones – we can deliver this through an app, which would pair data from the farmer’s soil with agronomic advice,” Monbiot said. “If not, we will develop alternatives, with the aim of making them just as easy and intelligible.”
He believes farmers will need minimal skills to gather and upload usable data. “In the ideal scenario, a read-out would tell farmers: “your soil is compacted in this corner of the field, but not over there, your average topsoil depth is w, your moisture content is x, your soil carbon is y and your connected porosity is z. You might wish to consider the following treatments …”
Typical savings in terms of inputs, water, energy are expected to vary greatly from one situation to the next. “Some farmers, especially in poorer parts of the world, might need to raise their inputs, so the saving in such cases would be a relative one: the difference between what they would have applied and the more precise approach the program can offer. Others are likely to make absolute savings.”
‘Seismology works anywhere there’s solid ground – but building the database is key’
Meanwhile, the method looks promising in any conditions and is not expected to be hampered by stony soils, saline soils, high shrink-swell clays or frozen ground. “As long as you have a solid medium, seismology can be applied,” Monbiot said. “Obviously, to be useful to farmers faced with these conditions, we will need to populate the database with soils subject to them. So, the utility will depend on the database, and the database will expand as the utility grows. Obviously, that means there is a hump to get over in the early stages, and we will rely, as we have done so far, on the goodwill of farmers and other managers, who want to see the project succeed. But then we hope, the roll-out should start to snowball.”
Dr Andy Jarvis, director of Future of Food at the Bezos Earth Fund, added: “Anyone who’s ever dug a soil pit knows how hard it is to understand what’s happening below the surface. The Earth Rover Project team found a way to read that hidden world without tearing it apart, and that opens possibilities we simply haven’t had before."
