THE chorus of countless frogs fills the air. They are living in a rice crop in Barham, just over the NSW border near Koondrook, 320 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. As I walk along the embankment that holds in the water in which the rice is growing, the frogs quieten and the delicate hum of dragonflies can be heard.

The water is warm and filled with small fish and swimming beetles. ''Er, I'd keep an eye out for snakes,'' farmer Andrew McConnell says. ''It's one of the things about growing rice the way we do,'' he says drily. ''It's the biodiversity.''

The McConnell property at Barham produces white and brown organic rice. Credit:Richard Cornish

McConnell and his brother David grew up on Belmont, a 1820-hectare rice and sheep-grazing property just north of Koondrook on the Murray plains. Their family have been living on the farm for more than a century and about 50 years ago started farming rice. Twenty-five years ago, the McConnells turned their back on chemical fertilisers and pesticides and converted their farm to biodynamic practices.

''We started to change the way we farmed in the 1970s,'' David says. ''Eighty years before that our family had spent its spare time pulling out the red gum forest regrowth that followed the floods.