Vasily Robertovich Williams is an outstanding Russian scientist of global scale and responsible state approach to his work. He devoted his life to solving the most important problem of ensuring food and environmental security of the country. To achieve this goal, he set and solved the following tasks: scientific support of sustainable development and stability of domestic agriculture, agricultural lands and agricultural landscapes; balance of agriculture, crop production and animal husbandry; increasing soil fertility. His priority was the need to develop soil science in close connection with solving practical problems of obtaining high and sustainable yields of agricultural crops. V.R. Williams introduced many important elements into the Dokuchaev doctrine of soil and soil formation. He discovered new sides in understanding the soil, the importance of perennial grasses in the formation of soil fertility, created a new science about meadows, improved the basics of agricultural landscape management. His scientific works covered a wide range of issues of soil science, biology, geography, agriculture, meadow science, agricultural science. V.R. Williams founded the biological direction in the study of soils, developed the doctrine of the biological cycle of substances, about the essence of a single soil-forming process, about the organic matter of the soil. A significant contribution to the management and rational use of agricultural lands and agricultural landscapes is made by the grass-field farming system of V.R. Williams, which he named after his teachers — "Dokuchaev – Kostychev – Williams".