As a fresh-faced graduate, Simon Fox spent his first job working on soil nutrition and crop development in Swaziland. Those 18 months in the 1970s were enough to kick-start his life-long investigation of the relationship between soils, nutrients, nutrient availability and crop development.

Soil analysis techniques, he realised, did not show nutrients available to the plant, only the nutrient content. This meant some tests showed a nutrient was present, while it was actually ‘locked up’ and unavailable for the plant to use.

OptiYield provides a more accurate soil analysis, using 27 points of data, 30,000 lines of computer code and information from hundreds of research papers on crops and soil nutrients.

Its algorithms, written by Simon, who has worked as a software engineer as well as an agronomist, calculate the soil’s needs for the specific crop and market.

OptiYield also provides a programme of soil microbes and bio-stimulants which can switch desired genes in plants on and off. Customers have reported 25 per cent yield increases.