Vineyards are generally the most inhospitable of landscapes for the humble earthworm; the soil beneath vines is usually kept bare and compacted by machinery.

But scientists and winemakers have been exploring ways to turn vineyards into havens for worms.

The bare soil is problematic because worms need vegetation to be broken down by the microorganisms they eat. Pesticides are also highly harmful to the invertebrate, as is the practice of compacting the earth: worms need the soil to be porous so they can move through it.

Earthworms are important and threatened invertebrates – the engineers of an ecosystem that may be as diverse as the Amazon rainforest. Their diggings aerate soil and they pull fallen leaves and other organic matter into the earth and recycle them. But their populations have declined by a third in the UK over the past 25 years due to pesticide use and over-tilling of soil.

Marc-André Selosse, a professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, has been urging vineyards to increase grass and plant cover on their soil, and reduce the amount they till, to save the worms.

Selosse said: “In France, the vineyards are 3% of the agricultural area, and they are using 20% of the chemicals. In vineyards, for the soil there is a lot of treatments, so there’s a lot of compaction, and there is a lot of pesticides used. This all doesn’t mean the soil is dead because dead soil doesn’t exist, but it is the soil on which there is the most to do and on which we have a lot of data to do better.”

Worms had not yet vanished from the most intensively farmed vineyards, he said, but they did need to be supported with more regenerative practices.

“I think the worms are at a low level,” he said. “They are just surviving, but they are still there, which means that no one is thinking of buying earthworms for the soil, because they are there. It’s like Sleeping Beauty; they are there at very low level, and we have to wake them. But once again, in soil, we have resilience. It’s one part of biodiversity where they are so numerous that we were not able to kill all of them.”

Selosse said the main thing vineyards could do for worms was to stop tilling the soil – breaking it up and turning it over – even if that means that herbicides such as glyphosate are used instead to remove weeds. “When you go to no tillage, even when you use glyphosate, you increase the biomass of microbes [which the worms eat] by 30% which means that it’s better. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect, because you use glyphosate, but because of no tillage, it is better. In the future, sooner or later, we’ll have to stop glyphosate also but for now, tilling is the first cause of worm problems.”

A common earthworm in soil. Photograph: blickwinkel/Alamy

Now some vineyards in the UK are making worm-friendly wine. When Jules and Lucie Phillips, co-owners of Ham Street Wines in Kent, started their vineyard, they were advised to grow conventionally by tilling and using pesticides, but were horrified by the results.

Julessaid: “After we did that, we went out and we dug a soil pit immediately after planting, and then also later in the season, and we realised the soil was just dead. There were no worms. It was smelling not particularly interesting at all, and the structure was poor.”

The pair had a revelation. “We just thought, this is completely the wrong way of farming and we need to do something different. We want life in our soils. And so we began the conversion to organic in that same year, and we’re now certified biodynamic.”

Rather than using pesticides, they applied herbal teas to the vines to promote plant health, Jules said: “For example, horsetail tea has a real high silica content, and that improves the leaf cell wall and means that it’s more resilient.”

The couple run a no-till system under the vine: “We’ve let the cover crop grow really long, and we typically let it grow right up into the canopy up until about flowering, and then we’ll mow it back. And the benefits of that are huge. The cover crop is really growing and really establishing that root structure and getting it to its maximum point. And finally, we put a big mulch on top of the soil that’s going to feed those worms and feed that soil life.”

This has hugely helped their worm population: “We’ve seen our worm counts increase massively from basically none to around 20 or 30 in a spade full. So extrapolate that up to a square metre, and it’s a very decent volume.”

Rob Poyser, a viticulturist at the regenerative wine consultancy firm Vinescapes, said that growing wildflowers in the vineyards they consult on had also brought great results. “We think in between three and five years we can take a bare soil and bring it back to life, into a thriving ecosystem,” he said. “We’ve used things like cover crops to bring this vineyard to life, to build the fertility into this system, and organic matter. We’re bringing life back to these soils we’re using. We’re letting nature do it.”

Poyser said they allowed wildflowers to grow all over the vineyards, and clients were delighted when clover, for example, sprung up because “clovers are great companion plants under the vine for grapevines, they’re also loved by earthworms”.