Fungi, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, insects and earthworms form a food web that most farming systems slowly starve — and that regenerative farming deliberately feeds. It isn't sentiment. That biology is the machinery that builds structure, cycles nutrients and locks carbon in place.
The clearest, most measurable indicator of that living engine is the earthworm. On our regenerative fields we find up to 5× more earthworms than on comparable conventional land — a visible, diggable sign that the soil underneath is alive and working.
Earthworms are ecosystem engineers. Their burrows are the channels that carry water down into the profile (the same ones behind the infiltration gains in the previous article). Their casts are concentrated packages of plant-available nutrients. And they only thrive where there's food and shelter — surface residue, living roots, undisturbed ground. Plough that away and their numbers collapse; restore it and they come back.
The research bears this out repeatedly. A three-year field study in central Slovenia found earthworm abundance roughly tripled under no-till compared with conventional ploughing — a median of about 17 individuals per sample versus 6 — within just a few years of switching (Kaučič et al., 2025). A global meta-analysis drawing on 165 studies over 65 years confirmed the pattern: lower-intensity practices such as no-till and conservation agriculture consistently support higher earthworm abundance and biomass, with the strongest responses in fine-textured soils in temperate climates like ours (Scientific Reports, 2024). And a UK study of a full regenerative system — zero tillage, permanent cover, diverse rotation and mob grazing combined — found earthworm populations rose when all four practices were applied together, not just one (Trickett & Warner, 2022).
A field buzzing with soil life tends to support more of everything else too: pollinators, beneficial insects that keep pests in check, birds. That's not decoration — better natural pest control and pollination reduce the need for chemical inputs, which in turn protects the very soil biology that started the cycle. Diversity feeds diversity.
As with water, the difference between a study measuring one practice and a field running the full regenerative system is real. Earthworm numbers respond to the whole habitat — food supply, moisture, freedom from disturbance and freedom from the harsh synthetic inputs that suppress soil fauna. Change all of those at once and the recovery outpaces what any single-variable trial would predict.
For us, soil life isn't a side effect of carbon farming — it's the same phenomenon seen from a different angle. The biology that multiplies the earthworms is the biology that pumps carbon underground and holds it there.
Sources
