Farm data, nutrient density and biodiversity: who owns the value farmers create? Live @Groundswell ’26

Recorded in person at Groundswell, the UK’s largest regenerative agriculture festival, held each summer in Hertfordshire, this is a 55-minute panel session moderated by Koen van Seijen, bringing together four practitioners who spend their working lives at the intersection of farm data, investment, soil science, and biodiversity monitoring. The question on the table: who actually benefits when data is collected from farms? And is the answer changing?

The four panellists: Ichsani Wheeler, a soil scientist who grew up in permaculture and now uses open-source satellite data and AI to map soil carbon and gross primary productivity at 30-metre resolution across the globe; Benedikt Bösel, farmer of a 1,000-hectare arable and 2,000-hectare forestry operation in eastern Brandenburg, Germany, who has been running a full digital twin of his farm alongside the physical operation; Antony Yousefian, co-founder of The First Thirty — a reference to the first thirty centimetres of soil — an investment firm focused on the infrastructure needed to turn farms into preventative healthcare systems; and Matthijs Westerwoudt, co-founder of Wilder Land, who is building what he describes as a Strava for biodiversity, using AI-powered acoustic monitoring to give farmers real-time data on the birds, bats, and insects living on their land.

In this session, opened with a recording of birdsong from a regenerative farm in the Netherlands played to the 9am audience, the conversation moves from remote sensing and registry projects to the £30,000 value the NHS places on a single quality-adjusted life year (QALY), from the danger of farm data being used to set geographically-based input pricing against the farmer who generated it, to the moment Benedikt’s doctor told him she had never seen iron levels like his wife’s after giving birth, and why only 4% of his customers scanned the QR code that would have told them everything about the specific cow whose meat they were eating.

Video credit Commonland.

WHY MOST FARM DATA HAS BEEN USELESS — UNTIL NOW

Benedikt opens with a characteristically honest assessment: for most of his farming career, data has been useless. Historical snapshots that give no forward-looking signal. Incompatible datasets — soil samples, bird counts, yield records — that cannot be combined into anything actionable. Indicators where causality between method and outcome is unclear because you are dealing with living ecosystems. The digital twin he runs alongside his farm is not a solution to these problems so much as an experiment in whether they can be solved. What has changed, Antony Yousefian and Ichsani Wheeler argue, is the chatty botty thing — AI as an agronomy agent in your pocket, able to process complexity that would have required an expensive specialist the week before. The moment he identifies as different about 2026 versus 2015, when he first moved into ag tech: the cost of communicating with plants, of making sense of nature’s complexity, has finally collapsed.

“Most of the time we’re looking at historical data, so that gives me no real clue about how I’m gonna act looking forward. And there is not necessarily a causality between the method and the data because we’re talking about living ecosystems.” — Benedikt Bösel

THE COST OF COMMUNICATING WITH PLANTS HAS COLLAPSED

Yousefian’s framing of the AI moment: the soil health data is still, in his words, pretty poor. The technologies to measure what actually matters — soil biology, plant health, animal health, the full complexity of a functioning farm ecosystem — are only beginning to arrive. But the cost of interpreting whatever data does exist, of having something close to an agronomist or ecologist available at the point of decision, has fallen off a cliff. He takes a picture of his garden plants with Gemini and gets a diagnosis. It is not perfect. Neither are agronomists. What matters is that the price of access has changed, and that changes who can build on top of the data infrastructure that already exists. The infrastructure companies — soil health measurement, animal health, biomarker monitoring, nutrient density measurement — are in Antony Yousefian’s view the rails for which the new food system will run.

“The cost of communicating with plants has collapsed. Now we can harness nature’s complexity, pipe it into the chatty botty thing, and there’s huge potential.” — Antony Yousefian

FOOD AS PREVENTATIVE HEALTHCARE: THE £30,000 PER LIFE YEAR ARGUMENT

In the UK, the average person develops a chronic disease at 61 and lives to 80. A quarter of life spent in ill health. The NHS values one additional quality-adjusted life year at £30,000 per head. That is the number against which the food system should be measured and funded — not the cost of keeping food cheap. The most valuable companies in Europe at the moment of this panel were Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, which sell GLP-1 injections to reduce appetite and treat obesity. Antony Yousefian’s argument: food companies could be doing this. Farms are the foundation. If a farm can be shown to produce food that genuinely extends healthy life, the financial value of that farm — and of the data that proves it — is seismic. Benedict’s story illustrates it: after his wife’s second birth, iron levels severely depleted, she ate blood sausage, liver, and meat from the farm’s own cattle. Her Berlin doctor — taking blood and stool samples regularly — said she had never seen iron levels recover like that after a birth. The doctor now recommends his farm’s produce to all her pregnancy patients.

“The value of this food system is massively undervalued. We need to stop talking about keeping food prices cheap and do total cost accounting. If you unlock additional life years, the potential is absolutely huge — and it despairs me that food companies do not see this opportunity.” — Antony Yousefian

THE STRAVA FOR BIODIVERSITY

Matthijs, co-foounder of Wilder Land, built Wilder Insights Lab on a simple insight from his previous company: 50% of people in the Netherlands do not know what biodiversity means, and of those who do, only 20% are aware there is a biodiversity crisis. Birds, however, everyone loves. So Wilder Land uses acoustic sensors — placed in fields, swamps, hedgerows — combined with AI-powered species identification to give farmers a real-time, 24/7 picture of what is living on their land. The farmer dashboard shows a biodiversity score, species detected, and a gap analysis: these ten indicator birds should be present in your habitat type; you have seven; here is what the missing three need in terms of food, nesting, and cover, and here is what you could do. The comparison function is the Strava element: how does your farm compare to a similar-habitat neighbour? The transparency element is the commercial one — a QR code on your product linking to live biodiversity data from your farm, making the choice between a high-biodiversity and low-biodiversity source visible to any consumer willing to scan.

“Where would you like to buy your food from? From a farm full of life with 3,000 species, 88 birds, insects, bats, frogs? Or from a farm with 10 birds and five insects? You choose.” — Matthijs Westerwoudt, Wilder Land

WHO REALLY BENEFITS FROM FARM DATA — AND THE WARNING

Ichsani Wheeler is the one who introduces the caveat that hangs over the rest of the session. An individual farmer’s data, on its own, is not particularly valuable. Aggregated, it becomes potentially very valuable — and there is documented precedent for how that aggregated value flows away from the farmer. In 2013 in the US, yield data was combined with methods similar to those discussed in the session, and the result was geographically-based surveillance pricing: input companies used the data farmers had generated to charge more in areas where yields justified it. Ichsani Wheeler’s own work involves signing data-sharing agreements with governments under jurisdictions she does not fully understand, releasing training data under conditions she can only partially verify. Her conclusion is not to stop sharing — community wins, open data wins, the registry project she is building is built on the premise that routine soil data should just be available, not locked behind MRV company paywalls. But the question of who controls the truth, who controls what the AI bots are trained on, is the governance question that nobody in the session fully resolves.

“This data can be used, and is used, and has been used, and will be used against you. But I also believe that community wins. It’s the strongest thing we have.” — Ichsani Wheeler

WHAT IS UNDERVALUED — AND HOW TO UNLOCK IT

The session’s closing question — what is currently unvalued that could unlock value for farmers — produces four different answers that together describe the shape of a system not yet built. Benedikt’s: the missing link between consumer health understanding and biodiversity in the field. His QR code experiment showed that only 4% of customers scanned the most comprehensive product transparency he could offer. Not because they don’t care, but because the narrative of climate and biodiversity has exhausted people. The entry point is individual health. Antony Yousefian’s: the same thing, expressed as infrastructure — nutrient density measurement companies, biomarker companies, animal health companies, the rails on which a new food-as-healthcare system can run. Ichsani Wheeler’s: the importance of each farm telling its own story, and of keeping control of the truth that story is built from. Matthijs’: the moment a farmer can say “our farm has 88 species of bird” on a product label, and that means something to the person buying it.

“If you speak to people with regards to their own individual health, that is really powerful. That connection between people’s own health and food, which relates back to biodiversity above and below ground — that is the missing link.” — Benedikt Bösel

OTHER POINTS DISCUSSED

The panel also covered:

True cost accounting — Benedikt’s estimate: the value of food production is only a fifth of the true cost; the rest is externalised onto ecosystems, health systems, and future generations; the policy question is how to make visible what is currently invisible in the price
The hourglass — Antony Yousefian’s structural framing of the food system: input companies at the top extract margin, distribution and brands at the bottom extract margin, farmers are squeezed in the middle with the least money in the whole chain; ag tech that tries to sell to farmers is trying to sell to the people with the least money
Drones collapsing the cost of intervention — Antony Yousefian’s most optimistic near-term prediction: drone companies are taking monitoring costs down to pence per hectare, and the same logistics infrastructure is beginning to make direct-to-consumer delivery viable even for smaller farms
The gatekeepers question — from the audience: who can stop or enable the 90% of the world still outside the regenerative movement? Antony Yousefian’s answer: not the usual suspects; he expects an open-source cooperative to emerge from current AI tooling within 18–24 months, and sees Apple and its health wearables as a potential unexpected enabler

LINKS:

RELATED EPISODES:

This session is part of the AI 4 Soil Health project which aims to help farmers and policy makers by providing new tools powered by AI to monitor and predict soil health across Europe. For more information visit ai4soilhealth.eu.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

This work has received funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee [grant numbers 10053484, 1005216, 1006329].

This work has received funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

——————————————

Feedback, comments, suggestions? Reach me via Twitter @KoenvanSeijen, in the comments below or through Get in Touch on this website.

Join the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P

The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

JOIN OUR COMMUNITY NOW!