Seeking alternatives to conventional agriculture’s use of chemicals, Farmer James Williams talks us through his method for improving the quality of his soil, through natural farming techniques.

Soil with James Williams

Natural farming principles, at its very basic core, is you get micro-organisms from untouched areas of woodland and places like that. You bring them back, you multiply them up, and then you spread them out onto the ground.

And these are the collection boxes. So what you do is you fill this with rice, you take out to the wood, you find sort of fungi, mycelium on the floor, which is like the roots of the fungi.

And you just place this on that, leave it there for about a week, and the fungi will grow up into the rice and you'll see a big, like, a fungal bloom in the box. You bring that back and you essentially put it on ice by adding sugar to it.

And that's what you're left with then. And then what you can do is you can take just a handful of this, give it food and grow that up again, mix it with water, aerate it, and then spread it out onto the land.

And that's 80% of, sort of, natural farming, that is. What you're doing is repopulating the microbes of the soil. But it's not just repopulating, it’s diversity as well. Putting diversity of microbes back into the soil that you've, you know, we've lost basically through bad management practices over the years like.