About
About Living Earth Biology
I'm John, and I look at soil under a microscope for a living.
And one thing I've learned is that what you see growing above the ground doesn't always tell you what's going on underneath it. You can be doing everything you think is right, watering, feeding, adding compost, and still have plants that struggle. Sometimes the answer isn't another product. It's understanding what's actually happening in the soil.
Years ago, long before any of this became a business, I wrote something down in a journal. I'd bought a small farm in Tasmania and was turning over every possible way to make a life in soil actually work. It wasn't an easy stretch, and I was doing a lot of thinking about what mattered and why.
Someone had once told me that if I looked after my pennies, the pounds would look after themselves. I never accumulated many pennies, but the essence of what they said stuck with me. And sitting there working through it all, I found myself wanting to apply that same idea to something else entirely.
Repopulating our land with biology.
The thought was simple. Most of us are lucky enough to have a garden. If we each look after our own few square metres, applying biology, reducing unnecessary chemical inputs, not disturbing the soil, then collectively that adds up to hundreds of thousands of acres coming back to life.
Each of us doing our own little bit becomes part of the sum total of all of us doing the best we can.
I wrote that years before RootWise Balance existed. The belief came first. The product came later.
Why soil
I knew I wanted my work to give something back to the planet. Not offset it, not minimise the damage, actually give back. And once I started looking into soil, the answer was obvious. There's no better way to give back to the Earth than working with the soil itself. It's the foundation everything else grows from, literally and otherwise.
So I trained in soil biology, and for years I worked with farmers and growers across NSW, doing soil microscopy assessments and helping people figure out why their land wasn't performing the way it should.
And I kept seeing the same thing, over and over. People doing everything right. Good watering, good fertiliser, good intentions. And still getting plants that were under performing or not taking off at all.
The soil looked fine on top. But under the microscope, there were often problems with the biology that's supposed to be doing so much of the work. The bacteria, fungi and other organisms involved in nutrient cycling and building healthy soil weren't always present in the numbers or balance you'd hope to see.
That's what changed how I looked at soil.
Instead of asking what else we should put into it, I started asking a different question.
What's actually going on beneath the surface?
The bigger picture
The more soil I looked at, the more that old journal entry started to make sense.
One garden at a time, one consult at a time, is good work. But there's a lot of soil out there that could benefit from a healthier biological community, and not everyone can have me out with a microscope and compost extract.
What if there was a way to make beneficial soil biology more accessible? Something people could use in their own backyards, in pots, raised beds and garden beds, without needing specialist equipment or years of knowledge.
That's where RootWise Balance came from.
A simple way to introduce beneficial soil biology into your pots and garden beds, using just a teaspoon in your watering can. No complicated process. Just another way to support the living system beneath your plants.
And if enough people are doing that in their own backyards, that's a lot of soil being cared for differently.
That's the square metres idea I wrote down all those years ago, just at a scale I could never have reached on my own.
Where this comes from
I trained through Dr Elaine Ingham's Soil Food Web School and have spent years doing field work and microscopy assessments for growers across the Northern Rivers.
My work has also been supported through Byron Shire Council's Regenerative Agriculture program, applying this same biological approach on a market garden project across the shire. I've done trial work for the Local Land Care Service as well as numerous growers from cattle farms, organic farms and orchards.
RootWise Balance isn't a product I came up with first and tried to find a problem for. It came directly out of what I was seeing in soil samples, again and again, for real people growing real plants.
And it came out of a belief I held long before I had anything to sell. That looking after the soil beneath our own feet matters.
Because when enough of us look after our own few square metres, those small changes add up to something much bigger.
If you want to understand more about what's going on beneath the surface:
Explore the Science Behind Soil Biology
If you're ready to start supporting the biology in your own garden: