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.