Ben Butler, co-founder and data-preneur, data for farmers!

Episodio 120 - 2025-08-03

In this episode we had a conversation with Benjamin (Ben) Butler. Ben is currently the co-founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) at Soil Benchmark. Ben has an academic background that got started with his love for surf driving him to getting his Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Ocean Science. After that he got a Master of Science (MSc) in Environmental Chemistry to finish up with his PhD in Ocean Science.

After a post-doc job as Research Scientist at the James Hutton Institute, he met Tom at a Soil Science conference which was an encounter that would result in the pair co-founding Soil Benchmark in August 2022. Since then, the company has focused on helping farmers (and consultants) make better decisions for soil and nutrient management using geospatial data, and today serves 10% of cultivated land in England.

Ben mentioned that Soil Benchmark leverages UK open government data. Diego loved listening to this and to see real companies delivering real value to customers, based on Open Data (his past at his open data platform startup!). The UK’s Environment Agency released a Lidar survey as part of this open data initiative, and covers the whole of England, at a 1 meter resolution, offering crucial slope and slope length data which well joined with other datasets of water and soil types allows Soil Benchmark to generate a lot of value to end users.

Ben talked about projects and stack (GCP, Shiny, R and the tidyverse, SQL, Python, and docker images among others) and we then talked a bit about the future of this industry. We also touched on GenAI initiatives that Soil Benchmark is embarking on, both internally to the company and to improve code speed and quality, as well as outward looking.

To finish up, Ben talked about the power of Linkedin as a source of trends, relevant technologies (this is how he discovered faucet and mapgl for example) and ideas that he then takes home to his team and the initiatives they are driving.

Relevant links