Biofonic
Agriculture that focuses on heavy chemical and physical interventions has decimated our soils, diminishing biodiversity and thrusting us towards ecosystem collapse.
Recent scientific understanding points to soil biodiversity as the foundation of soil health, but current soil tests focus on chemistry. The biodiversity within the soil beneath our feet is estimated to be orders of magnitude greater than above the soil, but we have yet to invent new methods of measuring it.
Biofonic is an eco-acoustic monitoring device that measures soundscapes within soil. By listening to the soil we can detect key indicators of soil health and enable farmers and researchers to quantify the impact of ecosystem-focused farming. We hope this data will accelerate progress towards saving arable farmland in a sustainable manner, illuminating how regenerative soil practices impact crop yield, reducing the environmental cost of agro-chemicals, and quantifying the carbon sequestration potential of our soils.
Biofonic was initially designed in collaboration with Eve Townsend, Japser Mallinson, and Tommy Zihao Guo in Autumn, 2022.
We engaged in a user-research and systems-based design process in order to identify a high-impact intervention for improving the ecological and human factors in food production. We interviewed over 40 farmer and agritech experts, lived and worked on a farm, conducted co-design workshops and have collaborated on our research with institutions such as Oxford University, University of Washington and Harper Adams.
Thus far Biofonic has undergone testing in 3 different regions of the UK across over a dozen types of conventional, organic, and regenerative field treatments.
