Farmed landscapes provide a natural laboratory to test how management reshapes near-surface hydrodynamics. Combining distributed acoustic sensing with physics-based hydromechanical modeling, we tracked minute-resolution, meter-scale changes across experimental fields with controlled tillage and compaction histories. We find that dynamic capillary effects, rate-dependent suction stresses during wetting and drying, govern transient stiffness and moisture redistribution in disturbed soils, producing sharp post-rain velocity drops from near-surface saturation and large hysteretic velocity rebounds driven by evapotranspiration. By pairing a seismic rainfall proxy with a drainage closure, we invert velocity changes to estimate evapotranspiration, revealing how disturbance alters flux partitioning and storage.

We investigate the application of ultra-high frequency (UHF) seismic for soil analysis at the decimetre scale. We conducted experiments in agricultural fields and controlled environments to assess the efficacy of various seismic sources, receiver types, and data-processing approaches. Our experiments demonstrate that a coherent UHF (>500Hz) seismic wavefield can be recorded by 16 ground-motion sensors over a distance of 3m.

We identify UHF P-waves, S-waves, and surface waves with clear move-out. Hammer strikes generate high-amplitude and impulsive signals in the 800-1500Hz range. Among tested receivers, the LOM geophone (priced under £100) has adequate sensitivity for field deployments, and is a low-cost alternative to industry-standard accelerometers. 

This opens the door to applying conventional imaging techniques such as first-arrival tomographic imaging, surface-wave dispersion analysis, full-waveform inversion, or machine-learning based inversions for estimating the properties of top soil relevant to farmers.