Agriculture in the UK faces growing pressures from climate change, biodiversity loss and regulatory change, alongside financial constraints and increasing reporting demands. Rather than adding further reporting burdens, there is significant opportunity to improve the use of existing environmental and agricultural data.

The Spatial Finance Initiative have developed a database for England that connects agricultural land to farming entities and estimates production at field and farm level by linking fragmented UK datasets on land ownership, field boundaries, crop production, livestock, soils and environmental indicators. The full methodology is outlined in detail in this research article.

The database covers over 117,000 farming entities and approximately 8.6 million hectares of agricultural land in England. While subject to methodological limitations, it represents an important step towards open, asset-level agricultural data and enables more granular environmental and financial risk analysis across the food system. 

This database consists of two complementary datasets:

• One higher confidence dataset for ‘owner’ or ‘beneficiary’ entities where the relationship between the ownership or operation of the land and the entity is documented in at least one external source.
• One lower confidence dataset for ‘farm’ entities where the relationship between the ownership or operation of the land and the entity has been modelled.

More information about the difference between these datasets is available in the methodology.

A more granular dataset that includes detailed location information for agricultural land parcels is available on request for UK researchers only. 

The Spatial Finance Initiative England Agriculture Production Database can be used by others and is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International). The suggested citation is: Sheikh, H.A., Singh, A., Kushwaha, N. et al. A Field-Level Asset Mapping Dataset for England’s Agricultural Sector. Sci Data 12, 1240 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-05521-8

This is our first version of a comprehensive farm-level agriculture production database for England and we encourage others to improve and build upon this work. Please inform us about any errors, omissions or other feedback through the contact form below.

This database was created as part of the agri-climate partnership between the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group and Barclays.