Soil Health is Human Health
Feb 19, 2026
‘We’ve sleep-walked into a supplement culture and a wellness industry that focuses on which supplement is best,’ says Katie Ward, part of a dad and daughter team who run microbz – making fermented soil-based organism probiotics. ‘What we need to be asking is why? Why are we taking all these supplements? This is actually a food and farming question and what excites us at Microbz is the link between soil health and gut health.’
Katie’s father was a therapist who worked with inventors and investors to bring products to market. ‘He travelled all over the world and about twenty years ago in Australia he was shown something called microbial balancing technology,’ Katie explains. ‘He was very excited about it and when he came home, he and my mother started brewing small amounts of microbes at the kitchen table.’
For fifteen years the business operated from an outbuilding on the family’s five acres of organic land but two years ago, the company rebranded. ‘We decided that we were going to be serious about it so we built a big factory. Now we make the mother culture on the farm and take that to the factory to brew and bottle it into probiotic formulas.’
Essentially Microbz replicates the way nature has supported human health for centuries, harnessing good bacteria (otherwise known as microbes or soil-based organisms) directly from soil and fermenting them with medicinal herbs and minerals. The result is an award-winning probiotic supplement designed to relieve gut-related health conditions, including IBS, hormone imbalance, fatigue, autoimmune disease, stress and anxiety.
Katie explains how the mother culture is made.
‘To harvest the microbes from our land, we dig a big hole, put down a starch item, and leave that in the land for about 10 to 15 days. Microbes are attracted to the starch, and when you pull that up, it has the most incredible rainbow-like color and it smells like fresh earth. Essentially we’re fermenting the starch, which collects at least 15 strains of microbes from the soil. The microbial balancing technology my father first saw is all about diversity and rebalancing of natural life.
‘Our hope is that one day the food and farming system is so full of microbial life that you wouldn't need a supplement, because you would get what you needed from locally grown healthy food.’
Katie will be leading a lunchtime talk at FarmED on 3rd March, when bottles of Microbz probiotic will be on sale with a 20% discount.
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