When people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a magician. Not because I pull rabbits out of hats.

But because I take things most people throw away, put it all into our “special box” and six to eight weeks later pull out something which changes the way food grows, smells and tastes.

The magic is compost.

But not the kind you find in a bag at Bunnings.

The ingredients I put in the box would surprise most people.

Brewery sludge, chicken processing water, grease-trap waste, oat husks, grain waste, water-based paints, even engine coolant.

I collect what Australia deems waste and convert it into magic potion that returns carbon to the soil.

Every year C-Wise, an organic carbon recycling business, collects about 200,000 tonnes of material destined for landfill and transforms it into 90,000 tonnes of compost.

We take the waste most industries treat as a problem to be disposed of and convert it into high-quality carbon compost through an industrial and scientific composting process.

Pick up a handful of good soil and it’s dark, rich and alive.

It smells earthy.

Pick up a handful from a degraded paddock in the WA wheatbelt for example and it’s pale, sandy and dry.

There’s practically nothing living in it.

That difference is organic carbon.

When the WA wheatbelt was first cleared, soil organic carbon levels sat at around 2.3 to 2.5 per cent.

Today the average is closer to 0.7 per cent.

At 0.5 per cent, you have desertification.

Last summer I grew rock melons in my backyard and my whole garden smelled of sweetness.

But pick up a commercially grown rock melon from the supermarket and there’s barely any smell at all.

That’s got little to do with the variety and everything to do with the soil it was grown in.

Older farmers understand this instinctively.

Many will tell you the crops their parents and grandparents grew tasted better, lasted longer and relied less on synthetic chemicals and more on the biology already present in the ground.

Food reflects this too.

A potato grown in rich dark soil is more nutritious and better-tasting than one grown in depleted sandy soil stripped of carbon and biological life.

For 70 years we’ve been mining Australian soils and we’re now seeing the consequences.

It began when synthetic nitrogen fertiliser arrived.

It felt like a miracle.

Farmers could grow more food and more reliably on the same land.

But over time, the carbon and biology began disappearing from the ground, leaving soils depleted, fragile and increasingly dependent on more synthetic inputs just to keep producing.

We’ve all bought a lettuce that looked perfectly plump in the shop and is a wilted mess two days later.

That’s not a storage problem; it’s a growing problem.

Lettuce pushed to grow fast on liquid nitrogen fertiliser grows big and green and quickly, but the cells are weak.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve accepted limp fruit and veg as normal.

We have normalised food that looks good and disappears fast.

And much of this comes back to the condition of the soil it was grown in.

Soil without organic carbon is essentially dead.

It’s sandy, dry and unable to hold water or nutrients.

Add carbon in the right form and everything changes.

It becomes a living micro-ecosystem.

Bacteria, fungi, earthworms and invertebrates all working together to cycle nutrients, retain water and grow healthy plants.

I believe we’re at a turning point.

The era of solving agricultural challenges with more synthetic inputs has been productive. But these inputs have also depleted soils, polluted waterways and created a food system that often prioritises appeal over resilience, nutrition, and taste.

What I hope is coming is the age of biology where we stop seeing organic waste as rubbish and start seeing it as one of the most valuable resources we have.

Carbon, nutrients, and biology are the raw ingredients needed to bring Australian soils back to life and grow healthier food.

I’ve spent my career doing this work because I believe it matters — for farmers and for the environment, but also for the food on our plates and the soil we leave for the generation that comes after us.

The race is long.

But the soil is worth fighting for.

And so is the food that comes from it.

Greg Watts is the chief executive officer of C-Wise.