How satellite soil maps give every Kenyan farmer a free soil test
A laboratory soil test costs money and weeks of waiting, so most Kenyan farms have never had one. Yet a soil test has, in effect, already been done for every farm in the country. It came from space, it is open data, and it is what ShambaIQ turns into a free soil and fertilizer plan for any farmer.
Most Kenyan farms have never had a soil test
A laboratory soil test in Kenya costs roughly KES 1,500 to 3,500, means travelling to a KALRO or private lab, and takes one to three weeks to come back. For a smallholder planting two acres, that is money and time better spent on seed and fertilizer.
So most farmers do what their parents did. They plant the crop the neighbour plants, and they apply the fertilizer the agrovet happens to be pushing that season. Sometimes it works. Often it wastes a season and a fertilizer budget on soil that was never going to cooperate, because the real problem, low pH or a missing nutrient, was never visible in the first place.
What changed: soil data from space
Over the last decade, iSDA (Innovative Solutions for Decision Agriculture) built something remarkable: a soil map of the entire African continent at 30-metre resolution, produced by combining satellite imagery with tens of thousands of physical soil samples and machine learning.
Thirty metres means the map carries a distinct reading roughly every 30 paces across your farm, fine enough to tell one field from the next. And it carries the properties that actually decide what grows: pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, organic carbon and soil texture.
This is open data, published under a CC BY 4.0 licence and free for anyone to build on. It is, in effect, a soil test that has already been done for every farm in Kenya. The only thing missing was a way to put it into a farmer's hands in language they can act on.
What ShambaIQ does with it
ShambaIQ looks up your farm's soil properties from iSDA's 30m layer. Where 30m coverage is thin, it falls back to ISRIC SoilGrids so that no farm is ever left without a reading.
Then it does the part that matters to a farmer: it translates that soil chemistry into a plain answer. Which crops suit this soil. Which fertilizer to buy, and how many bags per acre. Whether the soil is too acidic and needs lime first. All of it free, in English or Kiswahili, for every one of Kenya's 47 counties and 110 crops.
No lab. No two-week wait. No KES 3,000. You enter your location and you get a plan.
What a farmer actually gets
The pH, nitrogen, phosphorus, organic carbon and texture for your exact location, drawn from the 30m soil layer rather than a guess.
A ranking of which crops actually match your soil and climate, so you plant what the land will reward rather than what the neighbour happened to plant.
The specific fertilizer type and quantity your soil needs, and whether it needs lime first to fix acidity before anything else.
Everything works in English or Kiswahili, across all 47 counties and 110 crops, at no cost.
What it is, and what it isn't
Honesty matters more than overclaiming, so we are clear with every farmer about this. A satellite-derived reading is an estimate, not a replacement for a physical lab test on a high-value or precision operation.
What it is, is a free, instant, science-backed starting point that is dramatically better than guessing. For the millions of smallholders who will never pay for a lab test, it is the first real soil information they have ever had, and it is enough to stop wasting fertilizer on the wrong crop and the wrong soil.
The data behind ShambaIQ
ShambaIQ is built on iSDAsoil (30m) and ISRIC SoilGrids, used under CC BY 4.0. Full sources and citations are on our data sources page.
Our thanks to the iSDA team, whose decision to make continent-scale soil data open is what makes free, data-driven advice for smallholder farmers possible at all.
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