Soil health may be one of agriculture’s hottest topics, but according to Simone Sala, executive director of Varda Foundation, the fascination with what lies beneath our feet is long overdue.
“Too often we still just treat it as dirt,” he says.
“Soil is just really cool. If you think that a quarter of our living biodiversity on Earth is hosted there, and we only know 4% of that. So basically there is a whole universe under our feet that we know a little about.”
Soil’s hidden importance
That curiosity sits at the heart of Varda’s mission. Originally founded by Yara International in 2021 as a start-up focused on agricultural data infrastructure, the organisation was created around a simple observation: every company serving farmers needs data, but no single company can build a truly comprehensive agricultural data ecosystem alone.
The challenge was particularly acute for soil information. While soil increasingly sits at the centre of discussions around productivity, resilience, biodiversity and climate change, the data describing it remains scattered across laboratories, research institutions, governments, agribusinesses and farmers themselves.
Why Varda walked away from the start-up model
Varda’s original ambition was to build a commercially scalable business. But Sala says the company quickly discovered a problem.
“There was always a question: how neutral are you? You’re still owned by Yara.”
No matter how much Varda stressed that Yara had no special access to the data, some remained wary of contributing information to a platform ultimately controlled by a commercial agribusiness.
“If you really want to build an infrastructure that every actor uses and every actor must trust, it can’t be owned by a single commercial actor,” says Sala.
That led to a major change in 2025, when Varda became an independent not-for-profit foundation based in Rome. The structure allows other organisations, including governments, food companies, investors and industry bodies, to join as co-founders and influence governance.
“The foundation was exactly the right home,” Sala says, insisting the move reflects a growing belief within agriculture that common data infrastructure should function more like public utilities than proprietary platforms.
From environmental issue to economic infrastructure
For Sala, the industry’s understanding of soil has evolved dramatically in recent years.
“A few years back it was just the input players,” he says. “Now I can see many organisations recognising that soil is no longer an environmental issue, but rather an economic infrastructure.”
In his view, soil is increasingly being recognised not simply as an environmental resource but as a strategic asset that underpins productivity, resilience, sustainability and financial performance across agriculture. It is also becoming an important factor in assessing supply chain risk, as companies seek to understand how soil conditions affect the long-term stability of agricultural production.
Recent research is helping to reinforce that shift.
Sala points to studies suggesting that land degradation is creating measurable economic losses for agriculture. At the same time, growing evidence links higher soil organic carbon levels with both improved yields and greater yield stability across seasons.
The consequence is that companies are increasingly interested in managing soil not only for environmental reasons but because they see direct impacts on profits, productivity and long-term resilience.
“Investing there becomes important,” says Sala. “But if you do not have data, if you do not have a way to measure your soil conditions and properties, it’s very hard to know what you’re investing into.”
Building a global soil data network
That is where Varda sees its opportunity.
The foundation’s flagship platform, SoilHive, is designed to make soil data more discoverable, accessible and usable.
Rather than creating a single central repository, the platform operates as a federated network. Organisations retain ownership of their information while making datasets discoverable to authorised users.
According to Sala, this model helps solve one of agriculture’s biggest data challenges: balancing collaboration with control.
“If you put your data in, you’re still the owner,” he explains. “You decide what your licence is. You decide who has access to what.”
The goal is to encourage more organisations to contribute data that would otherwise remain isolated in silos.
What new opportunities could emerge? The potential applications extend far beyond soil testing, Sala insists.
More precise farm recommendations
For growers, aggregated soil data could support more targeted nutrient management and soil-improvement strategies.
Sala cites a recent project with a Brazilian cooperative where soil data helped identify nutrient deficiencies across farms. An input supplier was then able to develop tailored fertiliser blends designed specifically for local conditions.
Rather than relying on generic recommendations, farmers could receive increasingly precise advice based on comprehensive local datasets.
Better agricultural insurance
Another emerging opportunity lies in agricultural finance.
Varda is currently working with an insurer in Africa to explore whether soil data can improve risk modelling.
The premise is straightforward: if soil characteristics influence how crops respond to drought, flooding or other weather events, insurers may be able to make more accurate assessments of farm-level risk.
That could potentially create benefits for both sides.
“If that’s true, then you can offer a more tailored service,” says Sala. “It can become more profitable for the insurance companies and cheaper and more tailored for the farmer.”
More resilient food supply chains
Food companies may stand to gain as well.
According to Sala, many multinational food businesses still lack integrated systems for storing and analysing soil information across their supply chains.
As a result, they may be missing opportunities to identify emerging risks or compare sourcing regions.
Through better soil intelligence, food manufacturers could assess long-term supply chain risk; monitor soil degradation trends; identify alternative sourcing regions; and evaluate crop suitability in new production areas. For companies facing increasing climate volatility, those insights could prove valuable.
The barriers remain significant
Despite growing enthusiasm around soil data, Sala acknowledges substantial obstacles remain.
One challenge is technical. Data is often collected in different formats, under different standards and using different methodologies.
But the bigger hurdle may be trust. Convincing organisations that they retain ownership of their information remains an ongoing process.
“You get to convince all the technical people and then eventually you have to talk to legal,” Sala jokes.
The third challenge is incentives. Many organisations possess potentially valuable datasets but see little reason to devote resources to sharing them. Creating mechanisms that reward participation remains one of the industry’s biggest unresolved questions.
What success looks like
Varda has not set rigid growth targets, although Sala notes that reaching one million soil data points would more than double what is currently openly available worldwide.
More important than numbers, however, is what gets built on top of the infrastructure.
“In five years there will be applications, service providers and organisations doing research on data that we would have been able to mobilise,” he says.
He envisages farmers accessing trusted soil archives, insurers building better products, start-ups developing new services, and policymakers monitoring soil degradation and erosion trends at regional scale.
Ultimately, Sala sees soil as one of agriculture’s most underappreciated resources.
“It provides us with a bunch of critical services,” he says. “It’s the largest terrestrial carbon pool. It filters water. It’s how nutrients get into the food that we consume.”
“It’s a crazily rich and diverse asset that we just treat as dirt while it’s not.”
“I mean, it’s awesome.”
