We sent our compost to a DNA lab. Here's what's actually living in it.
Everyone in this business says their soil is rich, premium, alive. We wanted to know what was actually in ours, so we paid a lab to sequence it. Here's the whole result.
September 4, 2026 · 3 min read
Walk down the soil aisle of any garden centre and read the bags. Rich. Premium. Teeming with life. Nobody tells you what that means, because for most of them it doesn’t mean anything in particular — it’s a word chosen by a marketing department, not a measurement.
We got tired of standing next to those bags making the same noises. So we sent ours to a lab.
What we actually did
We took a sample of our chicken manure compost and sent it to RhizeBio for DNA sequencing — test ID HA 01-24. Sequencing doesn’t ask an organism to grow on a plate; it reads the genetic material present in the sample and identifies what’s there. It’s a census, not a guess.
What came back
1,589 distinct microbial species. Bacteria, fungi and viruses, in one sample of finished compost.
To put that in perspective: the number itself matters less than the spread. The top ten species make up 29% of the population and the top hundred make up 67%, which means there’s a long tail of nearly 1,500 more organisms underneath. That’s what a resilient soil community looks like. A pile dominated by two or three organisms is fragile — knock out the dominant one and the whole system stalls. Diversity is insurance.
The community breaks down like this:
| Group | Share | Species |
|---|---|---|
| Bacteria | 96.9% | 1,540 |
| Fungi | 2.33% | 37 |
| Viruses | 0.75% | 12 |
The panel scores 18 functional traits — nitrogen fixation, denitrification, sulphur oxidation, cellulose breakdown and the rest — and we publish all eighteen, including the ones that are merely average. That is the number we care most about, because it describes what the biology can actually do.
The bacteria-to-fungi ratio, and why it matters for a vegetable garden
Our compost came back at 69:1 bacteria to fungi. Strongly bacterial.
That isn’t a defect — it’s a match. Annual plants, which is most of what people grow in a vegetable bed or a flower border, evolved in bacterially dominated soils. Bacteria cycle nutrients fast, and fast-growing annuals want nutrients fast. A forest, by contrast, wants a fungally dominated soil. If you’re growing tomatoes, peppers, squash and zinnias, bacterial dominance is the right tool.
Both mycorrhizal families showed up too — arbuscular (Gigaspora, Rhizophagus) and ectomycorrhizal (Cantharellus, Tuber, Pisolithus), at a ratio of 1.92 to 1. The arbuscular ones are the ones vegetable gardeners want; they partner directly with roots and reach further for water and phosphorus than a root can on its own.
What the community can do
The lab also scores functional potential — what the organisms present are equipped to do once they’re in your soil. These are the results:
- Iron acquisition, 85%. Iron is what keeps leaves deep green instead of pale and yellow.
- Low-oxygen function, 89%. The biology keeps working in the wet, packed pockets where most soil life stalls.
- Carbon fixation, 89%. Builds stable organic matter — structure that lasts years.
- High-oxygen function, 84%. Fully aerobic and mature. This is the signature of compost that was finished properly rather than sold early.
- Plant stress adaptation, 83%. Helps plants ride out a Carolina heat wave.
- Nitrogen fixation, 69%. Pulls nitrogen out of the air and hands it to your plants.
- Phosphorus mobilisation, 64%. Frees locked phosphorus — the fuel behind big blooms.
The full twelve, including the ones we don’t lead with, are published on the science page and in the lab report. We publish all of them. A company that only shows you its best number is telling you something about the rest.
Three organisms worth knowing by name
Streptomyces — 10.22%. The single most abundant organism in our sample. Streptomyces produce natural antibiotic compounds; a large share of the antibiotics in human medicine were originally isolated from this genus. In soil, they suppress disease.
Pseudomonas — 2.32%. A plant-growth-promoting bacterium that unlocks bound phosphorus and drives dense, fibrous rooting.
Bacillus — 0.45%. Primes the plant’s own immune response before trouble arrives.
Why we bothered
Nobody asked us to do this. It cost money and it carried a risk: if the report had come back thin, we’d have had a thin report about our own product.
We did it because “living soil” should be a measurement, not an adjective. Ours is. If you want to check our work, the numbers are all on the site, and the lab has a name.