The farmers healing their fields with fungi

By Earth to Sea News · 26 July 2026

Underground allies older than the dinosaurs are going back to work.

Beneath every healthy field runs a hidden marketplace. Mycorrhizal fungi thread themselves among plant roots and trade with them, water and minerals in exchange for sugars, a partnership older than the dinosaurs. Industrial farming, with its deep ploughs and heavy chemicals, broke up much of that underground web. Now pilot projects across Europe and North America are deliberately seeding it back, inoculating soils with living fungal networks so the old partnership can go back to work.

The early word from the paddocks is encouraging: farmers involved in the first trials report crops that stand up better to rough weather and a reduced need for chemical fertiliser, while researchers watch the fungi quietly drawing carbon down into the soil as they grow. These are early seasons, not settled science, and honesty says so. But there is something lovely about a fix for modern farming that is not a new machine at all, just an old friendship, reintroduced. The farmers supply the field. The fungi, as ever, supply the network.