Soil-dwelling bacteria may represent a rich source of new antimicrobials and other drugs as they have already been found to produce valuable secondary metabolites, including antibiotics and antifungals. However, most of these molecules are derived from a small number of culturable taxa. This study reports draft genomes of hundreds of uncultured bacteria from a grassland soil ecosystem in northern California, United States. Using genome-resolved metagenomics, the authors analysed newly reconstructed genomes from 149 Acidobacteria, 135 Verrucomicrobia, 43 Rokubacteria and 49 Gemmatimonadetes species, which are highly abundant in soil ecosystems but had not previously been linked to secondary metabolite biosynthesis with confidence. They found 1,159 biosynthetic gene clusters that are predicted to encode various molecules, including peptides, bacteriocins and metabolites of unknown function, demonstrating that the biosynthetic potential of soil-dwelling bacteria has been underestimated.