The Soil Heroes’ Farm-lab - where practical experience meets innovative research…

What is a Farm-lab? A farm-lab is an on-farm satellite lab designed to analyse #soilhealth, plant tissue and crops for optimal plant growth and nutritional content. The farm-lab is currently under construction and will occupy the space inside of the Klompe Farm’s historic horse barn with an adjacent outdoor greenhouse space for processing samples, giving tours, facilitating classes and enjoying a view of the trial fields.?

The Soil Heroes Foundation and Klompe Landbouw are building out an on-site farm-lab. The lab will be equipped with many of things you’d expect to find in a traditional lab like a microscope and pipettes but will also be bringing in some newer technologies like NIR and XRF spectrometry. These newer tools are carefully selected for ease of use in the field and can provide more immediate results as opposed to waiting for weeks to get results from a traditional lab. The goal of the farm-lab is to combine practical experience with innovative research and to find out what is possible to measure and monitor on site.?

The lab will allow for more immediate analysis of #soilbiology and #soilmicronutrients combined with plant tissue analysis to better understand how #farmmanagementpractices influence the?#nutrientcycling throughout the growing season. The findings will allow for real time applications of natural amendments like #biofertilizers and #biostimulants . By allowing for real time insights, farming practices can be adjusted in the current growing season across the 360ha farm to improve plant growth and resilience to pests and other climate factors.

The experience farm will use the farm-lab as an educational space to share research and findings with visitors throughout the year. Combining research and education with real time farming will enable the Klompe farm to provide experiential learning opportunities for other farmers, educators, researchers, food companies and policymakers. In this way the farm-lab will be a critical leverage point for shared learning and system wide impact on how our food is grown and how these methods can better work with nature to produce more nutrient dense crops: a living example of how soil health connects to food and human health.

We invite you to come out for a tour of the farm and farm-lab this summer once construction is complete!?

Please click the link below to express your interest in future farm tours and get on the waiting list. We'll get in touch when the 2023 schedule is released.?

Sign up here!?