Fact: there are more living things in one teaspoon of soil than there are people on the planet.

You may not have given much thought to soil but it is pretty amazing stuff and Chris Kneale, owner of the Rural Business Consultancy, knows more about it than most.

’If you get healthy soil, you get healthy plants, you get healthy food and you get healthy people, so soil is pretty much where it all starts,’ he says.

Chris can help farmers to tranform soil which is a bit below par and this can have a big impact on their efficiency and profitability.

It all starts with finding out exactly what is in their soil.

Chris says: ’The challenge at the moment is the price of fertiliser and I would encourage everybody to start with a soil analysis: do some soil sampling and base their fertiliser use on the back of the recommendations rather than just spreading, and the same with organic manures.

’I send samples to an approved lab in the UK and they can do a variety of different tests. Some are just basic - lime, phosphate, potash and magnesium - but we also like to do a few in-depth ones, to look at the micronutrients and the cation exchange capacity.

’When we do the in-depth ones we get more of an idea of how healthy the soil is and also its ability to hold nutrients and retain nutrients, which has an impact on our recommendation of how to best manage that soil. It can also help to identify if there’s a compaction issue.’

Chris adds that farmers are getting more interested in their soil and in testing their soil, for reasons such as climate change concerns and trying to be more efficient with fertiliser, given its huge rise in price.

He says: ’The other thing that we do is to get farmers to be more aware of the actual organic matter and the carbon content of their soils. It starts to build a picture over time with all these carbon conversations that we’re having.’

There are other tests Chris suggests to help with the performance of soil.

He says: ’I saw a recent Tweet from a lab in the UK that was testing manures and slurries, and the range of nutrient content within those slurries was huge. So it’s well worth testing your manures and slurries as well, to understand what value is in those, so that you can hopefully reduce purchased fertilisers on the back of that.’

Soil aside, most of Chris’ consultancy business is around farm performance overall and how to improve it.

He says: ’I want farmers to understand their business and I think that that largely starts with identifying what it is that they are wanting long term for themselves. Once you’ve identified that vision, then you can put in the steps necessary to achieve that and they can start to make decisions with a view to taking that business in the direction that they want.

’The way I try to help farmers is for them to make those decisions rather than for me to make them for them.’

Helping farms to achieve their potential is, he adds, very rewarding.

He says: ’It’s the people more than the fields - on my emails it says "rural business consultancy helping people in business to grow" and I think you need both - people have the potential, they just need help to give them confidence.’