Project Update
FarmBalance concluded (Jan 2026)
Our FarmBalance project concluded at the end of January 2026 and brought to a close a complex, exciting and enlightening programme of stakeholder engagement, fieldwork, testing, data analysis and farmer-led product development.
We have clear next steps planned including market testing a suite of prototype products for farmers and supply chains, supporting supply chain projects with scalable environmental baselines, and a clear MRV approach for planning and monitoring change.
During the project we have built a Natural Living Laboratory and a company called Oversite Earth that is starting to help farmers, natural capital providers and supply chains with their MRV.
The future is exciting.
Thank you
We want to say huge thank you to Innovate UK and DEFRA for the project funding and support along the way, as well as to our Advisory Board of Chivas Brothers, NatureScot, Scotch Whisky Research Institute, Lloyds Bank, Credit Nature and Duncan Grain (our grain merchant) and a special thank you David and Fiona Gordon (Cairnfield farmers) for your support, hospitality and in-depth insights and knowledge through the project.
Continued Collaboration
The project has brought together Satarla, Terrabotics, and the James Hutton Institute in a strong collaboration that continues post-project raising funds and investing time and expertise in growing our Natural Living Laboratory at Cairnfield Farms to accelerate innovation and monitoring for farmers and supply chains.
Key Learnings
The project has strengthened our understanding of what data is important for farmers, and what it takes to build trust and value for farmers, supply chains and finance partners.
- Farmers must be able to understand, trust and own their data with data ownership clear from day one.
- Joining the dots between actions and both environmental and financial outcomes is absolutely key. This includes understanding the economics of change, and the trade-offs that farmers face. Resilience and reduced risks are common objectives but context is key.
- Aligning on outcomes across farms, incentive schemes and supply chains is fundamental in defining key outcomes and what monitoring and data is required to measure change. This needs to be defined at a level that allows farmers to make their own choices and balance actions across the whole farm (soil, biodiversity, water, emissions).
- Solutions require data that is both scientifically grounded and practical. This involves fusing datasets to create robust and meaningful baselines, and combining field methods with remote sensing and analytics for affordable MRV to measure change over time.
- The opportunities come from making insights usable and accessible: engaging farmers with familiar tools such as email briefings to help them to curate data in one place and explore what is useful and valuable to them is a popular option.
What’s Next
- We will be building on the prototype products developed through FarmBalance, including three linked options (a Resilience Model, a Smart Map, and farmer-friendly Dispatch briefings) to support baselining, planning, decision-making and monitoring change.
- Extending and stress-testing this approach through our Natural Living Laboratory in Scotland (at Cairnfield), where we can keep ground-truthing what good, or good enough, looks like across soil, water, biodiversity and the wider system in real farming conditions.
- Scaling MRV capability through Oversite Earth, established as a dedicated sustainability intelligence venture that combines Terrabotics’ Earth Observation expertise with Satarla’s risk, ESG and research capability, helping translate monitoring into credible, decision-grade insight.
We look forward to working with the great network of partners and connections we have made through the project to help accelerate profitable, sustainable land stewardship that is transformative and transparent.
Funding Partners
Operating Partners
Other Partners
FarmBalance was a key project under Satarla’s Natural Living Laboratory. It was co-funded by DEFRA and Innovate UK, and brought together Satarla, Terrabotics, and James Hutton Institute as partners to accelerate Innovation in Environmental Monitoring to support farmers and supply chains. The project provided farmers and land owners with insights and meaningful metrics across climate, soil health, biodiversity and water for dynamic decision-making on sustainable land use and practices, as well as access to diverse financial incentives and income to support change.
Valuing Nature for Farmers
FarmBalance Objectives
Innovation: FarmBalance was about driving innovation in environmental monitoring by combining monitoring techniques and analytics to ground truth data and establish dynamic, cost effective insights across soil health, emissions, water, and biodiversity indicators. This included physical sampling, biodiversity audits, weather stations, sensors, LTIR, bioacoustics, LiDAR, and Earth Observation with periodic, semi-continuous and continuous data feeds.
Valuable, actionable insights: FarmBalance delivered affordable, effective insights and metrics proven from first principles observed at the project Calibration Site. This helps farmers make land use decisions for both environmental and financial returns.
Robust Data Driving Real Change
Robust and practical data: FarmBalance is focused on understanding robust datasets and insights that have practical application for farmers and supply chains. This includes data that helps:
- More dynamic decision making at a farm level during the growing season.
- Easier access to incentive schemes with confidence in the data and automated data inputs.
- Provide robust, dynamic data for supply chain assurance at a farm level.
- Access other financial benefits such as carbon/nature markets, and/or green finance.
Collaboration and risk sharing: FarmBalance empowers farmers to understand and manage their own data, and provide transparency to supply chain and finance partners to align on objectives, make and monitor decisions and actions on sustainable practices and share the risk of the transition.
Scale: FarmBalance will down-selected monitoring methods providing key insights that could be confidently scaled for impacts across farms, landscapes and sectors.
The Challenges and Opportunities
The Problem
Unless farmers are supported to nurture soils and conserve nature, the world will not meet its climate and nature commitments. Farmers carry the most risk and play the most important role in land use decisions and management. FarmBalance combines relevant environmental and commercial data to support farmers to access incentives, product premiums, diverse markets and financial services that support sustainable farming practices and land management.
Key Challenge
- Farmers carry the most risk yet play the most important role in land use decisions and management.
- Insights that support balanced decision making are limited or prohibitively expensive. For example, carbon footprints, soil carbon verification, nature modelling, or farm level data often rely on manual, periodic testing and do not provide the full picture.
- Policies and legislation are evolving rapidly, and farmers and organisations must manage risks and take actions that result in the right environmental outcomes and data reporting.
The Opportunity
FarmBalance harnessed the combined power of environmental and commercial data to support transparency and collaboration across supply chains, and leverage financial support to implement sustainable farming practices and land management.
This includes some key differentiators:
- Relevant data and insights. The project collected data and insights needed by farmers, agronomists, policy makers, supply chains and financial service providers to make and assess sustainable land management decisions.
- Focused on outcomes and change. It ensureed an understanding of data priorities, desired environmental outcomes linked to key policy and corporate objectives and confidence in measuring change and impact.
- Based in science. Through detailed, practical research the project ground-truthed, calibrated, and fused unique combinations of traditional, novel, and remote sensing monitoring techniques validated at the farm calibration site. This established verifiable sustainability indicators as well as traditional agricultural metrics used to inform farming practices and yields (soil moisture, pH, NPK etc).
- Stakeholder engagement and trust. Through meaningful conversations with farmers and supply chain partners and alignment on relevant insights and results.
How FarmBalance is Different?
FarmBalance delivered a solution that is relevant and affordable for farmers and key stakeholders in order to support real change. The project:
- Invested in user research focusing on the benefits to farmers and stakeholders, focusing on both environmental and commercial outcomes.
- Established dynamic, affordable metrics where possible, moving from sporadic, manual, expensive, field-based collection to create value and support decisions.
- Leveraged data analytics and machine learning for precision and efficiency.
- Provided insights through existing apps, systems and platforms for ease of use through farm, supply chain, and business practices.
- Created the potential for verified data for carbon credit schemes, subsidies, green insurance and finance and supply chain schemes.
Our Supply Chain
The FarmBalance project sits within the beautiful Speyside region that feeds the Speyside whisky industry. Understanding and connecting supply chain motivations and support is critical to environmental and commercial outcomes that benefit everyone and ensure the longevity of the landscape, tourism and the sector.
The Team and Technology
FarmBalance brought together a unique collaboration of partners with expertise in sustainable agriculture and land management across Commercial, Earth Observation Analytics and Applied Science disciplines with Satarla, Terrabotics and James Hutton Institute. With full access to the project Calibration Farm site in North East Scotland and the support of our Advisory Board and supply chain partners the project had a unique advantage combining environmental and commercial imperatives. Enjoy our video of fieldwork and collaboration in action.