Steve Nicholson's canola crop is looking good - especially considering Wirrinya has only had half its average rainfall this season.

Growers from our district but also as far afield as Western Australia, northern NSW and Victoria came to an on-farm field day to check it out.

Mr Nicholson is one of the first on board with Loam, sowing broadacre crops with fungal endophytes that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transform it into stable carbon in the soil where it's needed.

This means it's not just the canola yield he is excited to see come harvest, it's the improvement in his soils afterwards.

That's something he's been looking for his entire career.

"It will change the world," Mr Nicholson said.

It's technology that has in the past 10 years gone from university laboratory to the world's farms - and pioneered by a handful of people from the central west.

Three of Loam's founders are long-term Forbes agronomist Guy Webb, Bogan Gate's Tegan Nock and Trangie farmer and grazier Mick Wettenhall,

"I recognised early that (carbon) is a clear metric to soil fertility and cropping programs but frustrated that it wasn't easy to store carbon, as much as you'd like to, and we were actually losing it," agronomist and Loam co-founder Guy Webb said.

So when he first heard about Sydney University research that showed that fungi on the roots of plants could capture atmospheric carbon through plants and store it in the soil, the project had Mr Webb's full attention.

They just needed to get the attention of the rest of the world - and over the past five years, they have.

"We got recognised by investors - government and venture capital - they could see it as a global solution to both soil fertility decline and climate change," Mr Webb said.

Given the scale of the claims they were making, they needed to do the science and do it right.

Loam now has scientists working in Australia and internationally, with offices and research laboratories in Canada, US and Brazil.

"It's "pinch me now" sort of stuff every day when I go to the Loam laboratories and see all these scientists, there's something like 30 post-doc scientists working on specifically soil carbon and sequestration using biology and breaking all sorts of new barriers doing it," Guy said.

Australian farmers, including Mr Nicholson, have signed up to 25-year projects that will measure the carbon in their soils - with the increase converted in to Australian Carbon Credit Units that can be sold on the market.

"There's about 10,000 hectares under crop this year," Guy said.

"There are six growers under way this year and another cohort coming on next year, a lot more."

As the project is government-backed there's a protocol around measuring the soil carbon before and after you sow with the endophyte.

That increase in soil carbon is converted to carbon dioxide equivalents, and earns you Australian Carbon Credit Units.

What you do with that, says Steve Nicholson, is up to the grower, "but at least we become part of the solution not just a whipping boy for the problem".

Steve was an agronomist for some 40 years and has owned his Wirrinya property for 22 years.

Much like Guy, he's been looking at the problem of depleting carbon in long-term cropping soils for decades. Increased carbon means increased resilience to wet and dry conditions.

"We played around with world best practice to get what we call labile soil carbon," he said.

"So we fixed the topsoil, fixed the crumbling nature of it, stopped the cracking, better germination, better moisture penetration - all those sorts of things. But there's a limitation to what you can do."

When Loam released canola and barley seeds treated with the endophyte, Mr Nicholson was keen to get them in the ground and more than keen to share his journey with other farmers.

His other message to his peers was, this isn't a silver bullet: it's part and parcel of overall management.

"You've got to still farm really well and then the endophyte will really work," he said.

"It's all related to root biomass. If you grow a big robust crop with a big robust root system you'll grow a lot more carbon."

Over the long term, that will secure our cropping soils for future generations - and capture a lot of atmospheric carbon.

Globally, farmers manage 1.5 billion hectares of cropping land.

"A lot of the effort has been in collaboration with universities and research organisations around the planet that we select specifically because they're really good at a particular section of the puzzle that we're trying to solve," Mr Webb said.

And yes, other crops will be available soon: first wheat then pulses and grazing crops.