Simon Cowell won the 2018 Soil farmer of The Year competition organised by Farm Carbon Cutting Toolkit and Innovation for Agriculture. He started getting interested in soil and its biology twenty years ago and has been improving his heavy clay soils by stopping all tillage, making and applying highly biologically active compost and building mycorrhizal fungi populations. To prove the theory that a balanced soil food web can provide all the nutrients a crop needs, he hasn’t applied any phosphate or potash fertilisers in all that time and has started experimenting with cutting out nitrogen applications as well.