About
I'm John, and I look at soil under a microscope for a living.
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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.
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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, stopping the chemicals, 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.
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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.
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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 wouldn't take off.
The soil looked fine on top. But under the microscope, the biology that's supposed to be doing the work, the bacteria and fungi that feed plants and build healthy soil, just wasn't there. Or there wasn't enough of it.
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That's the gap. Not effort. Not knowledge. Biology.
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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 needs biology back in it, and not everyone can have me out with a microscope and compost extract.
What if there was a way to get that same biology into as much soil as possible, as simply as possible. Backyard pots, raised beds, struggling garden beds, all of it.
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That's RootWise Balance. The same biology that makes compost work, including some of it compost can't deliver, in a teaspoon you add to your watering can. No compost pile. No mess. Just the biology your soil needs to start functioning again.
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If enough people are doing that in their own backyards, that's a lot of soil coming back to life. 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.
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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's also been backed by Byron Shire Council's Regenerative Agriculture program, applying this same biological approach on a market garden project across the shire.
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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 with real gardens. And it came out of a belief I held long before I had anything to sell.
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If you want to go deeper into the science behind it,
If you just want to get started,