A groundbreaking soil-health measuring technique could help avert famine and drought, scientists have said.

At the moment, scientists have to dig lots of holes to study the soil, which is time-consuming and damages its structure, making the sampling less accurate.

Soil experts have now convened the Earth Rover programme, which uses seismology – a technology used for measuring down to the Earth’s crust, understanding earthquakes and detecting hydrocarbons – to assess soil for the first time.

The team’s geophysicists and soil scientists call this technique “soilsmology” and aim to finely map the world’s living soils. To do it, they place a piece of metal on the soil, hit it with a hammer and measure the waves. These bounce back off hard surfaces such as rocks or compacted soil and travel through the structure of holes made by earthworms and microorganisms, to provide a fine-grained map of what is happening underground.

The waves can also be affected by the dryness of the soil so can detect when more water is needed and the extent of microbial life so farmers know when to add more organic matter.

The non-profit company, cofounded by the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, aims to create a free app for farmers to measure the health of their soil and to be given advice on how to improve it.

The soil ecologist Prof Simon Jeffery, another co-founder, said: “Soil is one of our most precious resources. 99% of the calories we consume come from the soil, from plants we eat or from animals who eat the plants which grow in the soil. It’s very underappreciated as many people don’t know how important it is, but without soil we would not be here.”

Poor agricultural practice of tilling soil and adding pesticides, as well as erosion and extreme weather caused by climate breakdown, have damaged the soil we need across the world to grow food. Global crop yields are forecast to reduce in some regions by 50% as the population increases.

It is difficult for farmers to address soil problems due to a lack of fine-tuned mapping. Crop yields can vary from metre to metre within the same field, owing mostly to soil properties that are undetectable from the surface, meaning farmers rely on broad interventions such as fertilising and tilling the whole field, which harms wildlife and soil health, pollutes rivers and is expensive.

Peter Mosongo, a soil scientist based in Kenya, said this could be life-changing for farmers in the region. “We were in a village near Mount Kenya and a farmer there told us he has never done any soil sampling on the farm. They’re aware they need to do that testing but the labs which are able to do it are far apart and the poorest farmers do not have the ability to get there. Our technology can find areas of subsoil compaction which can, in turn, reduce flood risk and increase crop yields.

“If we are going to address soil fertility we can address the food crisis. We can tell farmers the problems with their soil and then they can increase their yield by taking interventions like adding more organic matter.”

Using the seismic wave technology means Mosongo and Jeffrey will not have to dig as many holes in their day-to-day lives. “Peter and I have dug far too many holes in our time,” said Jeffrey.

Soil is under-researched, Jeffrey said. The UK, being a small and well-studied island, has the best soil map in the world, but even that is a 5km x 5km grid of accuracy, which is not finely tuned enough to know all the different soil types and the fertility and compaction differences across a field.

Jeffrey said: “Where I am at Harper Adams [an agricultural university in Shropshire], the soil map says there are only three types of soil and no peat, but actually we have found 18 types and quite a lot of peat with this technique.”

The situation was worse in countries in Africa, Mosongo said, where the soil map “relies on a few samples”, which means farmers have been unable to address fertility problems.

He said: “We have problems when the rainy seasons come – the water cannot penetrate the lower layer so we get a lot of flooding. The plants also do not survive as the roots cannot penetrate.”

It was important to protect soils from erosion and degradation, Monsongo said. “In the UK it can take about 500 years for 1cm of soil to develop. That can be washed away in an afternoon. It ends up in rivers as sediment and is washed towards the ocean – we can’t get it back. If we run out of soil, we run out of food.”

The method can also be used to measure the amount of carbon in the soil, as currently much of that calculation is guesswork.

Most importantly, they hope their technology can help farmers to continue to feed the world. Mosongo said: “We have increasing population growth and we are not increasing agricultural productivity, it is going down. If we do not do anything, we are looking at starvation.”

Aidan Keith, a soil ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, who is not involved in the project, said: “Soil is a relatively complicated medium when it comes to listening and tuning in to wave signals. The development of advanced yet affordable sensor technology, and robust data analysis, to predict a variety of key soil physical properties using seismic waves could be transformative.

“It has great potential as a method with limited disturbance and straightforward deployment but, of course, we do need a sound understanding of current boundaries and ultimate limits. Interdisciplinary collaboration is key to give greater meaning to observed data.”