(upbeat music) - I'm Daniel Mays, I run Frith Farm where we are here today.

Frith Farm is a no-till, organic vegetable and fruit farm.

We grow on about three acres.

It's at a scale that I call human scale, so we do most work by hand and we do no tillage.

So we never disturb the soil.

No-till farming is farming without tilling.

So with... tillage is when we mechanically disturb the soil, so sending fast-moving metal through this soil profile, that's tillage.

So we're choosing to farm without doing that because tillage has been shown to be really harmful to the soil ecosystem.

And also healthy soil just leads to easier farming because plants are naturally pest and disease resistant.

And sometimes the term regenerative farming or regenerative agriculture is used in that way.

- My name is Ian Jerolmack, I'm here at my farm Stonecipher Farm in Bowdoinham, Maine.

I'm a certified organic mixed vegetable farm.

I became no-till following the practices of Daniel Mays.

Once you've established some no-till beds, or some no-till gardens, at that point, what you're gonna observe happening is the soil life wakes up, all the invertebrates that prefer a non-disturbed soil move in, funguses that seek to break down trash material and other organic matter and feed your crops, can all do their job undisturbed.

I call this a no-till touchdown.

I'm very proud of moments like this on the farm, when mushrooms are encouraged to grow, says a lot about the health of the soil.

Look at all this fungal life going on in here.

That is just awesome for the plants that are going to create their symbiotic nutrient exchange with the fungus later on.

And the soil ends up requiring less nutrients and less water to do an even better job than you probably had seen in your gardens before.

- I'm Beth Schiller, this is Dandelion Spring Farm, which is on Wabanaki land, we're in Bowdoinham, Maine.

And we are transitioning from some traditional tractor bed and grow crop methods to a no-till permanent bed system.

So we feel really lucky.

We have a great crew here today from Frith Farm and Stonecipher that are helping us make this transition.

- [Daniel Mays] So that involves, you know, laying out the beds, shaping them, marking them out carefully.

And now we're laying a layer of compost over the beds, and then we'll fill the pads with wood chips.

- It's a layered process.

And if this all goes well for Beth, you'll never see her ground again.

She will only, as we do on our farm, as Daniel does on his farm, continue to add materials on top.

- [Daniel Mays] And that makes a completely weed free experience if we do it right.

And also has all sorts of benefits to the soil health.

- I grew up starting to farm when a production farmer did not farm in this method.

That was not the model that was taught to me, and I embraced a different model for many years.

And now we're at a place in our production where we feel like we've got both the confidence to make a transition, but also acknowledging that, in the end, this is gonna be a management practice that is better for the land and for our farm team.

It's better for the soil in many ways.

And I think it's gonna help us create even more nutritious crops because there's just gonna be such a larger microbial and living network in these beds.

- [Daniel Mays] For me, it feels like such a blessing to play in the dirt with plants producing food and, you know, feeding families within our community.

It feels like such a joy and a privilege.

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