A small bottle of pale green liquid sits on a bench at a Western Sydney agricultural campus. It smells faintly of fermentation – nothing dramatic. But according to Joseph Ayoub, genetics engineer and founder of Swift Grow, this unassuming liquid has achieved results that have attracted attention well beyond the paddock.
It has also been tested on soil that hasn’t supported life for billions of years: simulated Martian regolith and lunar dust, sourced from the same supplier that provides NASA with planetary soil simulants for research and education.
The story of how Mr Ayoub’s company ended up running experiments on material designed to mimic the surface of another planet – and what those experiments might tell us about the soil under our feet here in Australia – is one of the more unexpected threads running through regional innovation right now.
The work has also just received national industry recognition, with Mr Ayoub and Swift Grow winning three categories at the 2026 Australian Organic Industry Awards.
It comes at a time when Australian farmers are watching global fertiliser markets with real unease.
The Mars connection
Martian regolith contains a range of minerals that plants require, but it is very different from productive terrestrial soil. It lacks an established living soil ecosystem and can present chemical and physical challenges to plant growth.
Mr Ayoub’s team introduced Swift Grow – a microbial soil treatment developed over more than two decades at his Richmond facility – to samples of Mars and Moon simulant alongside untreated Earth soil as a control.
Mr Ayoub says the results were striking: germination on the treated Martian simulant outperformed the Earth-soil control. The lunar sample, by contrast, proved far more difficult to work with.
The experiment came about almost by accident.
Mr Ayoub says a technology scout working with one of Elon Musk’s advisers, as part of a search for innovations relevant to off-world agriculture, heard about Swift Grow and visited the facility. His team subsequently began Mars and lunar simulant trials and, he says, saw results within three days.
Word of the experiment travelled further than Mr Ayoub expected. He says interest from Saudi Arabia soon brought the conversation firmly back to Earth: could the same approach help restore severely degraded land in desert environments?
Inside E14: where it actually comes from
For all the talk of Mars and Saudi Arabia, the source of Swift Grow is considerably more down to earth – literally.
It’s made inside a modest shed at Western Sydney University‘s Richmond campus, known internally as E14, where Mr Ayoub has spent more than two decades farming barramundi.
The fish were the starting point, not the destination.
Mr Ayoub originally set out to grow clean, pesticide-free fish for human consumption using filtered Sydney water in a closed recirculating system.
He says testing of his first crop, about a year in the making, returned mercury levels close to 20 parts per million. After investigating the water and the rest of the production system, he traced the contamination to commercial fish meal made from fish offcuts.
It took Mr Ayoub roughly five years to develop a vegetarian feed the barramundi would eat and longer still, he says, to grow vegetables without reintroducing contaminants through agricultural inputs.
Subsequent testing found no detectable mercury in the fish, according to Mr Ayoub.
Then something unexpected happened.
When he started watering those vegetables with collected tank water, he noticed they grew faster, greener and more abundantly than he had seen before.
The water, it turned out, had become the more interesting product.
Fish effluent from the tanks passes through a sieve to remove solids before entering a fermentation process. Mr Ayoub describes the live culture involved as being “like yoghurt” – it needs to be maintained rather than allowed to run completely dry.
The bacteria are cultivated separately in tanks packed with small, perforated plastic media, creating a large surface area for microbial colonies to establish.
Before water returns to the fish tanks, it passes through UV treatment. The fish and microbial systems are deliberately kept separate because, Mr Ayoub says, the bacterial concentrations used for soil treatment would be harmful to the fish.
The final product is a highly concentrated fermented liquid rather than raw effluent. Swift Grow says it has a four-year shelf life without refrigeration and is typically diluted at around two millilitres per litre of water.
Mr Ayoub says one litre can treat about one hectare, depending on the application and condition of the soil.
The production model is designed to be scalable. “Each fish contributes enough waste to produce about six litres of Swift Grow concentrate each week.”
He also points to the relatively low energy demands of the Richmond system. Water circulation relies heavily on gravity, with UV filtration and a small number of pumps accounting for most of the electricity use. Mr Ayoub says the operating equipment draws less power than a household refrigerator.
It’s an unglamorous backstory for a product that’s been trialled on Martian soil simulant but it’s also, in its way, the most on-brand part of the operation: a soil treatment produced from a land-based fish farm in Richmond and now being tested far beyond Western Sydney.
Image: Bacteria are cultivated separately in tanks packed with small, perforated plastic media, creating a large surface area for microbial colonies to establish.
Getting farmers to try something different
For Mr Ayoub, developing the product has been only part of the challenge. Persuading farmers to change established practices can be harder.
He says growers are understandably wary of products promising dramatic improvements after years of being presented with new technologies and agricultural inputs that have not always lived up to their claims.
His approach has therefore centred on small-scale trials.
“Farmers need to see it working on their own land,” he says.
Mr Ayoub says some growers trialling Swift Grow have subsequently reduced their reliance on conventional soil inputs and water while recording higher yields.
The company also points to farmers using the product as part of broader moves towards organic production, although certification depends on the farming system as a whole and the requirements of the relevant certification scheme.
For Mr Ayoub, the significance is less about replacing one bottle with another than about changing the way growers think about what they are feeding.
Where the “greening the desert” teams got stuck
The Richmond production line is a long way from the Arabian desert but it’s exactly the kind of application that attracted interest from Saudi Arabia.
The kingdom has embarked on large-scale efforts to combat desertification under the Saudi Green Initiative, launched in 2021 with ambitious targets to rehabilitate degraded land and plant billions of trees.
Mr Ayoub says the interest in Swift Grow followed difficulties encountered in attempts to establish productive soil in desert environments.
His explanation for why his trial plots performed differently comes down to a basic distinction in approach.
Conventional fertilisers are designed primarily to deliver nutrients needed by the crop. Swift Grow, he argues, is designed to rebuild the biological activity in the soil that helps cycle and make nutrients available.
Once a diverse microbial community is functioning, he says, the soil becomes better able to sustain the processes that occur naturally in productive ecosystems.
It’s a distinction Mr Ayoub returns to repeatedly: instead of asking only what the plant needs, he argues growers should also ask what the soil beneath it has lost.
8,400 species
The scale of microbial diversity Swift Grow says it has identified in its concentrate is perhaps its most eye-catching scientific claim.
Mr Ayoub says DNA sequencing identified about 10,200 microbial species across repeated testing.
According to Mr Ayoub, researchers later applied a more conservative abundance threshold, excluding organisms detected only in extremely small quantities. That produced a figure of about 8,400 microbial species.
He uses an analogy to explain the discrepancy. Some organisms, he says, are like “workers” in a soil ecosystem and occur in large numbers, while others act more like “supervisors” and may be present only in tiny populations.
The precise ecological role of that diversity – and how it translates into field performance across different crops and soil types – is now part of the larger research question surrounding the product.
Mr Ayoub links the microbial community to the biology of the barramundi at the heart of his production system.
Barramundi themselves have an unusual reproductive cycle: they typically mature first as males, with many later changing sex to female.
Mr Ayoub believes the species’ long evolutionary history may also have helped preserve a diverse microbial community. Establishing that connection scientifically, however, requires further research.
Rethinking the fertiliser story
If the science is the engine of Swift Grow’s pitch, the history of synthetic fertiliser helps explain why Mr Ayoub believes agriculture needs to think differently about soil.
Synthetic nitrogen fertiliser is not a postwar invention. The Haber-Bosch process made industrial ammonia production possible in the early 20th century, transforming agriculture by allowing nitrogen fertilisers to be manufactured at enormous scale.
Their production and use expanded rapidly after the Second World War and became central to the productivity gains associated with modern intensive agriculture.
Mr Ayoub argues that this success also encouraged agriculture to focus heavily on delivering nutrients directly to crops rather than maintaining the biological systems that cycle nutrients naturally in healthy soils.
Nitrogen illustrates the point.
Although nitrogen makes up roughly 78 per cent of Earth’s atmosphere, most plants cannot access atmospheric nitrogen directly. They depend on nitrogen that has been converted into biologically available forms, including through microbial processes in soils and through symbiotic relationships between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and plants such as legumes.
Synthetic fertilisers provide those nutrients directly.
Mr Ayoub’s argument is not that farmers have been doing something wrong. Rather, he believes decades of dependence on external inputs have obscured the importance of the microbial activity occurring beneath the crop.
He’s careful not to frame this as a conspiracy or an indictment of farmers. Instead, he describes it as an unintended consequence of agricultural systems that prioritised productivity at a time when the biological condition of soils attracted far less attention.
Today, concerns about fertiliser costs, nutrient losses, soil degradation and emissions are driving renewed interest in ways to reduce dependence on synthetic inputs without sacrificing yield.
Soil and carbon
There is also a climate dimension to the work.
Healthy soils can store substantial amounts of carbon in organic matter, plant roots and microbial biomass, making soil management an important part of the wider discussion around agricultural carbon.
Mr Ayoub points to research he says was presented to the United Nations in 2018 and concluded that restoring soil biology could play a significant role in drawing carbon from the atmosphere.
His argument is that rebuilding soil microbial communities increases the amount of carbon cycling through and remaining in the soil.
The relationship between soil biology, agricultural inputs and long-term carbon sequestration is complex, and the amount of additional carbon any soil can store depends on factors including climate, soil type, land use and farming practice.
But Mr Ayoub believes restoring depleted soil biology could materially increase the carbon retained in agricultural soils while also improving their productivity and resilience.
For him, that overlap is important: the same biological processes that make soils function better may also help them store more carbon.
What’s actually happening in the paddock
For all the scale of the Mars trials and the carbon discussion, the more immediately useful evidence for Australian growers may come from working farms and trial plots.
Mr Ayoub points to a series of examples.
In Thailand, he says a rice crop’s growing cycle fell from four months to three after treatment, alongside changes in yield and nutritional content.
In France, a side-by-side wheat trial initially appeared to show little difference between treated and untreated plots. Mr Ayoub says later analysis suggested microbial activity had moved from the treated area into its neighbouring control plot, complicating the comparison.
At a Hunter Valley vineyard, he says vines retained green leaves through winter after three years of treatment and the grower reported improved grape and wine quality.
A stud farm reportedly increased the number of horses it could carry on the same paddock rotation after several years of treatment, while Mr Ayoub says a Victorian grower using Swift Grow as part of a transition to organic production has since achieved certification and is now receiving triple the price for its hay.
These are individual cases rather than controlled, large-scale comparative trials, but they illustrate the kinds of outcomes that have encouraged growers to continue using the product.
There is another avenue of testing with potentially significant implications.
Mr Ayoub says independent laboratory analysis by ALS recorded reductions in measured PFAS and PFOS concentrations in trial soil over a three-month period – a result with obvious implications for land affected by industrial contamination, including former mining sites.
Putting the claims under research conditions
Swift Grow is now trying to move more of its evidence from farm observations into formal research.
Mr Ayoub says that since 2025 the company has been involved in research with Western Sydney University, including PhD-level work examining the effects of soil microbiome treatments on crop yields and plant tolerance to salinity and drought.
He says experiments completed in early 2026 using leafy green vegetables recorded substantially higher yields in treated soil than with conventional soil inputs.
Further to this, he says those findings are consistent with results from an earlier 2021 trial in the United Arab Emirates involving the Dubai-based International Center for Biosaline Agriculture.
The research is continuing, with salinity and drought tolerance a particular focus.
That work is potentially important to applications far beyond conventional farming, particularly in regions dealing with degraded soils, water constraints and desertification.
Three national organic industry awards
That work received another form of recognition in Melbourne on 2 September, when Mr Ayoub and Swift Grow won three categories at the 2026 Australian Organic Industry Awards.
Mr Ayoub, through River Stone Aquaculture Innovations, was named Certified Organic Sustainability Champion of the Year and Certified Organic Innovator of the Year.
Swift Grow was also named Certified Organic Biological Input of the Year, a category recognising certified organic farm and production inputs including soil conditioners and biofertilisers.
The awards, run by Australian Organic Limited, recognise achievement across Australia’s certified organic sector. The 2026 judging panel included representatives from Austrade, the Marine Stewardship Council and the National Farmers’ Federation.
For a product that began with an attempt to raise cleaner barramundi in a shed at Richmond, taking out three national organic industry categories marks a significant shift in profile.
The awards don’t answer every research question surrounding Swift Grow, but they do represent recognition from within an industry increasingly focused on soil health, biological inputs and alternatives to conventional farming systems.
A regional story with global reach
What makes this a genuinely interesting regional development story isn’t the Mars connection on its own, though it’s the kind of detail that tends to get attention.
It’s that a microbial product developed and manufactured at a relatively modest facility in Western Sydney has found its way into trials and farming applications from Australia to the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe.
It has also attracted interest from people looking at off-world agriculture and from researchers investigating how soil biology influences productivity under difficult growing conditions.
Closer to home, Swift Grow says the product is now being used by farmers, vineyards, permaculture groups and other land managers at a time when the cost and availability of conventional fertiliser inputs remain a live concern for Australian agriculture.
Whether Swift Grow ultimately proves capable of delivering the same results at broad commercial scale will depend on the research now under way and the performance growers see on their own land.
But the question at the centre of Mr Ayoub’s work is increasingly familiar across agriculture: after decades spent asking what crops need to grow, how much more attention should we be paying to the living soil beneath them?
Article and images: Liz Ginis, RDA Sydney Communications and Marketing Manager
