Assurances about who gets access to soil analysis results is critical for high farmer uptake in the Soil Nutrient Health Scheme (SNHS), a committee of MPs has been told.

Speaking in Westminster on Tuesday, Professor John Gilliland said 92% of farmers in Zone 1, which mostly covers Down and Armagh, signed up for the soil sampling scheme.

“The individual data, coming from an individual field, is the property of the farmer and the custodian of that [data] is the Agri Food and Biosciences Institute, which is a non-departmental public body,” he said.

'Collective data'

Gilliland said DAERA officials will only get access to a “collective of the data” across wide areas, such as river catchments, so they will not know the soil nutrient status of fields within individual farms.

“Farmers are canny people. They won’t give away their data. The deal we did was to ring-fence the ownership of the data. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get access to land,” he told MPs.

The former UFU president said a key benefit of the SNHS was that the same standard is being used to collect and analyse soil samples across the whole of NI.

He added that three smaller pilot schemes in NI found that 80% of farmers changed management practices “constructively” when they got access to detailed soil analysis results.

“If you empower land managers with really good information about their own farm, they will rise to the challenge,” Gilliland said.

Carbon stocks

Aside from soil analysis results, the SNHS will also provide farmers with an estimate of total carbon stocks in soils, hedgerows and trees.

However, Gilliland is advising farmers against selling carbon credits to other businesses who then use the credits to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions on paper.

“You might need some of your carbon stocks to offset the unavoidable emissions that your farm produces.

"Know your numbers first before you sell the crown jewels,” he warned.

As the SNHS provides baseline data on soil nutrients and carbon stocks, it could be repeated periodically to quantify how management practices and new support schemes change the condition of NI farms.

During the meeting in Westminster, several MPs remarked that although a new Environmental Land Management scheme is being rolled out in England, no baseline data is being collected at the outset.

“There are one or two things to learn from NI, which could apply to the rest of the country,” said Conservative MP and committee chair Sir Robert Goodwill.