Duy Huynh Anh
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Hyro

2026 Natural soil additive that helps rebuild soil health while making farms more resilient to a changing climate. It goes into the ground alongside the seed using equipment farmers already own, stores water when the soil is wet and releases it when it’s dry. That helps crops get through dry spells, and over time it improves the soil itself, giving farmers a low-risk way to move towards regenerative agriculture.


Context UK soils are deteriorating. Some estimates say farmland could lose its fertility within about 40 years, and vegetables have lost 5–40% of their minerals since 1950. Climate change is making it worse: in 2025 England had its second-worst harvest on record, after the driest spring in over a century. Three of the five worst harvests on record have come this decade.

Regenerative agriculture is widely seen as the fix, but few farmers are able to make the switch. Our brief was to understand why, and where in the system an intervention could actually change that.

Mapping The Transition Journey
We started by mapping how a farm converts to regenerative methods, treating the conversion as a service journey that runs over years. It has four stages:

  • Year 1: Preparation
  • Year 1-3: Post-Introduction
  • Year 3-5: Expansion
  • Year 6+: Reaping The Benefits

At each stage we logged what the farmer struggles with. Early on, the problems are high upfront costs, specialist equipment, detailed planning and grant applications. In the middle years, farmers face unfamiliar equipment, cover-crop termination, weeding and still-large knowledge gaps. Later, they are dealing with certification, monitoring, data management and finding the right market.

Four themes ran through every stage: yield, data, agency and knowledge. We looked at where each theme came up and identified four places a design could intervene: no-till, soil health, cover-crop termination and direct seeding.

What we learned: these opportunities only addressed today’s problems.
Farming is changing quickly, and we needed ideas that would still hold up in 15 years.





Designing For The Future We ran a PESTLE scan of European agriculture in 2040. It surfaced pesticide bans, labour shortages from an ageing workforce, more carbon-credit frameworks, worsening water scarcity and rising distrust of automation. From that scan we built four future scenarios, plotted against planetary health and societal condition.




We then defined the future we wanted to design towards. In it, regenerative food is affordable, policy rewards good stewardship, and technology supports regenerative practice instead of replacing it.


 Farmer Personas: Now and 2040 We profiled today’s farmer: typically older, owning or having inherited their land, with gross income of £125k–£250k on tight margins, who has seen climate change first hand. Then we projected two futures for that farmer:
  • If nothing changes: degraded land, falling subsidies, an isolated community and an uncertain succession.
  • In the future we wanted: stable income, resilient soil, strong peer networks and a farm the next generation actually wants to take on.

We mapped their pains (exposure to climate change, knowledge gaps, uncertainty about whether the farm has a future), gains (subsidies, pride in stewardship, community standing) and jobs to be done (transition gradually, improve resilience, diversify income).

What we learned: The barriers weren’t technical. They were about money, risk, identity and legacy.

Field Research We visited FarmED, a regenerative farming and education centre in the Cotswolds. We did a side-by-side smell test of conventional and regenerative soil, and interviewed three people: Ian Wilkinson (FarmED’s founder), Alex Dye (an entomologist) and Matt Smee (an agricologist).

“An acre could make you £200 one year and lose you £200 the next.”

Three insights reshaped the project:
  1. Farmers aren’t the ones who need convincing. They already understand why regenerative farming matters.
  2. Risk is the barrier. Improving soil takes years, the early years are the most exposed to the weather, and without a clear financial return, farmers on thin margins can’t take the gamble.
  3. Upfront cost blocks adoption, and there’s no agreed standard for what “good” soil is, so it’s hard to show progress.

We kept the conversation going with researchers at Imperial College and climate-action specialists throughout the project.


 Testing Our Own Assumptions Our first concepts were technology-heavy. We sketched and prototyped modular walking robots, machines to break up compacted subsoil, and precision soil sensing. Tested against what we’d heard in the field, each one failed for the same reason: it needed the capital, energy and digital infrastructure that farmers had just told us they don’t have. We also explored using dung beetles to carry nutrients deeper into the soil, but dropped it because it depended on having cattle on the farm.

What we learned: We were designing for the technology, not for the farmer.
 


 Finding Where To Step In Next, we mapped the yearly farm cycle: soil preparation → seed selection → sowing → fertilising → irrigation → pest control → harvest → post-harvest. We were looking for a point where something new could be added without adding a step. Sowing stood out: the farmer is already putting something into the ground with machinery they own.

We also split adopters into groups. Early adopters are small and medium farms already moving to regenerative methods and feeling the effects of climate change. Large industrial farms would follow later.

 Brief


  • Future-proof: it has to work as the climate gets more extreme.
  • Low capital: no new machinery, data infrastructure or specialist knowledge.
  • De-risk the transition: it has to protect farmers through the vulnerable early years and pay for itself.
  • Fit the existing routine: it slots into sowing instead of creating a new task.

There was also a gap in the market. Plenty of products improve soil, but almost none are built for climate resilience.
Development Material Concept We combined two materials that each make up for the other’s weaknesses. Biochar improves soil health and locks carbon away, but it washes off fields easily. Natural hydrogel absorbs up to 400× its dry weight in water, but it’s expensive and has no structure of its own. Bound together, the hydrogel holds the biochar in place and the biochar gives the hydrogel a shape.



We designed an extrudable profile so the pellets can be made at scale. The geometry gives a large surface area while using as little material as possible, which sets how fast the pellet releases water. The shape is parametric, so it can be adjusted for different soils and performance needs.

Designing The Deployment We named the concept Hyro and worked out how it moves from the factory to the soil, and checked our assumptions with farmers and specialists:
  • It goes into the ground with the seed through the drill seeders farmers already use, so no new equipment is needed.
  • It sits 10–15cm down, close to the roots, at about half a tonne per hectare.
  • The hydrogel breaks down over the season and leaves the biochar spread through the soil.
  • The formula changes by soil type, and the biochar content drops once the soil reaches its optimal level.


 Outcome Product & Service Hyro won a D&AD Wooden Pencil and is now being developed further with support from Greenhouse at Imperial and InnovationRCA.

The project produced a working proof of concept for a natural soil additive that helps farms hold on to water through dry spells and rebuilds soil health over time. Farmers need no new machinery and don’t face a large upfront cost. Alongside the material, we delivered a model for how Hyro works as a service:

  • Deployment: it goes in at sowing, using drill seeders farmers already own.
  • Pricing: it costs less than what farmers currently spend on fertiliser, and opens up carbon credits and government sustainability payments.
  • Rollout: it reaches small and medium farms first, which make up 61% of UK holdings. These are the farms already moving to regenerative methods.
©DHA 2026