Policy Report: Improving Soil Health in the UK

This policy report, Improving Soil Health in the UK, summarises the discussions from a roundtable hosted in 2025 to the following themes:

• The need to agree on a cross-disciplinary definition for 'healthy' soil
• The need to determine the most promising and/or suitable biological and microbiological indicator/s for soil health
• The need to discuss the original brief's recommended microbial solutions for sustainably managing soils, refining them based on multi-disciplinary input and perspectives (and potentially expanding them beyond the agricultural setting).

The report pulls out the key message of the need to foster effective communication across the soil stakeholder spectrum to build the trust and open-mindedness to risk that is necessary for enabling wide-scale, lasting change. 

The roundtable was hosted virtually, chaired by Dr Marcela Hernández (environmental microbiologist at the University of East Anglia), and had 34 participants representing academics, governmental and nongovernmental organisations, research institutes, agri-businesses and union representatives. 

This roundtable was held as a result of AMI's policy publication, Improving soil health in the UK: why a microbial approach is indispensable in attaining sustainable soils, published in AMI's Sustainable Microbiology journal, which aimed to:

• Highlight the opportunity of taking a harmonised microbiome-based approach to soil health across the UK, explaining why this could be beneficial over current approaches and how such an approach could be implemented across the UK’s four nations; and,
• Propose microbial solutions that can be deployed now – if supported by policymakers and key industry players across all four nations – to improve UK soil health, whilst exploring and building the basis for a microbiome approach. 

This journal article was based on discussions from AMI's ‘The Power of Microbes in Sustainable Crop Production’ event held at the John Innes Centre, in the UK in 2023. It focused on the impact of microbes in national agricultural settings and food security.

The article was distributed to stakeholders including the UK Government, research institutes, and non-governmental organisations, resulting in over 20 meetings between AMI and various organisations and individuals interested in the UK’s soil health. These meetings resulted in the decision to host the roundtable underpinning our new policy report.