Information about the root system architecture of plants is of great value in modern crop science. However, there is a dearth of tools that can provide field-scale measurements of below-ground parameters in a non-destructive and non-invasive fashion. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal, non-contact thermoacoustic sensing system to address this measurement gap and discuss various system design aspects in the context of belowground sensing. We also demonstrate the first thermoacoustic images of plant material (potatoes) in a soil medium, with the use of highly sensitive capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducers enabling non-contact detection and cm-scale image resolution. Finally, we show high correlation (adj. R 2 = 0.95) between the measured biomass content and the reconstructed thermoacoustic images of the potato tubers.