COVID-19 hit the agriculture sector hard. Farmers need new, diverse sources of revenue if we are to maintain a thriving UK rural economy. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) estimates dairy farmers alone lost £28m in April and May due to COVID-19\.

At the same time, climate change is probably the largest single threat to our planet and our civilisation. Recognising this, in June 2019 the UK Government showed global leadership by passing a commitment into law to achieve Net Zero by 2050\. Every sector in the UK economy will have to make fundamental changes if we are to achieve this bold vision, and we will have to develop new ways to measure and sequester carbon.

Understanding the role of natural capital in achieving Net Zero is essential, and this means more than just planting trees. DEFRA recognised this in the recent Agriculture Bill, which paved the way to replacing current Direct Payments to farmers with a new payment scheme which will reward farmers for reducing emissions and better managing soil quality.

This project is aimed at helping resolve both challenges.

By using sensing and artificial intelligence to monitor and understand soil quality, including the microbiome (bacteria, fungi and other organisms), in order to measure, verify and improve the carbon sequestration of soil, we will not only help the agriculture sector to achieve Net Zero, we will unlock new revenue streams for COVID19-hit farmers through accessing carbon credit markets.

The role of natural capital in combating climate change is being more widely recognised, but the role soil plays in the carbon cycle has so far been difficult to measure in a practical way for farmers and agronomists. This project will resolve that challenge by using both existing data sets and data from new inexpensive sensors, integrated with UnifAI's proven artificial intelligence capabilities, to demonstrate a cost effective and simple to deploy solution for continually and remotely measuring and monitoring the carbon sequestration of soil.

UnifAI Technology already has a strong and proven capability in combining low-cost sensing with AI to create highly innovative environmental monitoring capabilities in water. UnifAI's water quality solution uses a small number of directly measured parameters and a trained Artificial Neural Network to understand the real-time quality and microbiome of water, including the presence of harmful bacteria such as _E.Coli_ and _Legionella,_ and understanding the risk of eutrophication events and biofilm build up.

Expanding this ground-breaking work from water to soil was interrupted by COVID-19 when UnifAI, like many companies, saw commercial activity slow and in some cases stop altogether. We are now back on track, and with this InnovateUK grant we can get back to helping farmers in the UK and eventually elsewhere to diversify their revenue streams through the carbon trading markets, and to ensure that they adopt the right techniques and practices to maintain and enhance the quality and carbon sequestration capacity of the soil in their care in order to help decarbonise the agriculture sector.