Good post , I'm interested in how you establish a cereal crop after a grass ley when practicing DD as I understand it , it can be a challenge to have a good crop of DD wheat after grass or is that when you would plough as part of the grass ley rotationmicrobial expertise, is lacking by me.
but l do believe they are fundamentally important to maintaining soil health, along with worms etc. Ploughing is meant to kill off 50% of worms, so logic would say it affects microbial action as well.
l don't think we will start adding microbes to the soil, seems a bit 'snake oil' to me. But some would swear by it. We have concentrated on non inversion tillage, soils seem to be improving, more worm casts, and, alas, moles are coming back, as are mushrooms. So something has changed.
Its easy to say, not ploughing, saves the 'goodies' in the soil, and it must help. Whether that improves soils, is perhaps dependant on a few more years yet, to confirm. Being a mixed farm, and a former lover of ploughing, it has altered my opinion. Mixed, ploughing every 4-6 yrs, is very different to ploughing every year, for cereals.
We think it will help soil to become more resilient, and perhaps fertile. I also think its better to try some of these regen ideas, before they are inflicted upon us, by a bigotted nerd, in defra.